When to choose a clustered or a portal farm deployment
There are benefits to choosing a clustered deployment and there are benefits to choosing a portal farm environment. These benefits include performance and administering benefits. This information explains when to choose a clustered or portal farm deployment scenario.
When to choose a clustered deployment:
You may want to choose a clustered deployment if any of the following items match business needs:
- You prefer a comprehensive central administration point (which the Deployment Manager provides) rather than owning the responsibility of administering resources on each server separately.
- You have services that require only one instance running in the cell (such as an EJB or other service implemented as a JCA connector) instead of on each server in the cluster.
- You have scheduled tasks that should run only in one server of the cluster instead of in each server of a farm
When to choose a portal farm deployment:
You may want to choose a portal farm deployment if any of the following items match business needs:
- You require a more dynamic expansion and contraction of capacity by adding or removing machines, such as in a cloud-computing environment.
- You have a large deployment; for example, a hundred or more server instances; that would otherwise stretch the boundaries of a managed cell.
- You are comfortable automating administrative actions across a series of identical servers, such as restarting servers or applications, that the Deployment Manager would otherwise perform in a cluster.
- You do not require multiple clusters to provide continuous availability during maintenance and application updates.
Parent
Portal farm topology