Multiple portals vs multiple virtual portals
Virtual portals share several resources between themselves. Rather than having one each of these resources for each portal, all virtual portals use the same single instance of such a resource. This reduces the administrative overhead and optimizes the resource usage. Typically, virtual portal share the following resources:
- JVM
- Portlets and other code fragments
- Database
This resource sharing allows us to scale, hosting large numbers of virtual portals on a single portal installation.
On the other hand, sharing resources can creates dependencies between virtual portals. For example, if one of the virtual portals requires maintenance, all virtual portals are affected by the outage and undergo the same maintenance updates.
Share or separate virtual portal administration
Do you plan to have each virtual portal administered by its own group of administrators, or will we have a central administration group for the entire portal installation and all virtual portals?
We can select a specific group of sub-administrators, who can manage the resources and users of a particular virtual portal. The master administrator of the portal installation can set up the privileges of the sub-administrators individually for each virtual portal.
If we do not require a specific sub-administrator group for each virtual portal, the portal administrators can share the administrative work for all virtual portals.
Share or separate user populations
Does each virtual portal need its own separate user population, or can all virtual portals share the same single user population ?
To ensure that only members of a dedicated user population can access a virtual portal, use the realm concept provided by the Virtual Member Manager VMM, available as a built in user registry in WebSphere Application Server. This security concept is known as Federated security.
If all your virtual portals can use the same user population, we can configure federated security with a single realm. This realm can contain users and groups from one or more repositories.
Parent Deciding about virtual portalsRelated concepts:
Separate and share resources between virtual portals
Technotes for virtual portals