Different installtion options?

[dynamolalit]

Hi,

I  want to know following things:
1. Is there any difference between installation of alfresco installer provided by alfresco say .exe or .bin and say first i install tomcat on server first then configure alfresco & related components on tomcat especially wrt to performance & fine tuning?
2.  Which is the better way of these two as installer requires no time but separate setup take some time? Which is best suited for production systems?

Regards.

[mrogers]

The answer is "it depends" on your standards for applications.

A manual install will have everything set up as you want, or your standards dictate, rather than how someone writing the installer chose to lay out things.
For example many sys admins like to separate the data from the application code, but the installer puts everything under one folder, including the database, which is simpler for a casual user.

In addition if you are doing a multi-machine/ multi-tier installation then that tends to lead itself to a manual install.

Regardless of how you install Alfresco it may require "tuning".  In particular the memory settings and connection pool sizes need to be increased for large environments.  Or possibly decreased for small environments.  The installer is for a typical medium size one box solution.

I suggest if you are new to alfresco you use the installer.   Then as and when you are familiar with what goes where then install manually.

[dynamolalit]

Thanks a lot.

I have a clustered production system in mind having common DB & ContentStores. Should i use installer or manual separate installations?

Will there be any difference related to any kind of operations or performance between the two types?What would be the rule of thumb?

Regards,

[dynamolalit]

Hi Again,

As per my discussions & findings, can you/anyone confirm the below as i assume it to be correct.

1. If you are going to use Tomcat, then it is advisable to use bundled installation as it is equivalent to separate installation & configurations, including production systems.
2. If there is a need for other servers say JBoss or Oracle, we need to go with separate installations.
3. Whether you use bundled or separated installations, key is to optimize the alfresco server i.e. Tomcat, DB, JVM & alfresco-global properties. Anyhow, one need to optimize in both the cases for best performance.
4. Lookout for DB & lucene optimizations for best performance.
5. Finally, bundled installations comes with all packages such as WQS, Openoffice, Pdf2swf, SOLR etc, escaping you from all mundane jobs to install & configure them separately.

Hope this helps.

Regards.

[bisana]

Hi,
Even in the bundled extension you can select advanced options and select the database and application server of your choice.
Later on if you need to change the database you can change in alfresco-global.properties

About Application server, Alfresco should work in any application server, provided you have the war file and  deploy it :- this opinion is my own, I have not tested it

Ya you are correct at the last point mentioned