One Alfresco, Mutiple repositories. Is it Possible?

[mmilhome]

Hi,
   I am new to Alfresco, and must say it's a great software. I am loving it so far.

  What I need, and I do not figured out if it's possible in Alfresco is:

I have a server with alfresco installed. The disk of this server is getting full. I have another server, that has more space in it's disk, but I can't remove the disk from that server. So I was wondering if it's possible to map a directory of this disk on the other server to my Alfresco Server, and add this network map as a second repository, and make alfresco sum the amount of GB from both repositories? So it will be transparent to the final user. The final user will think that I increased the amount of disc of the alfresco server.

Please let me now if I am asking for something that makes no sense? :roll:


Thanks
Marcus Milhomem

[steve]

Hi,

It does make sense, but you currently can not do what you ask.

However, what you could do is map a directory as you had planned, and move the 'alf_data' directory to this new location.
You'll need to update the custom-repository.properties file and set the 'dir.root' to this new location.

This means that all the Alfresco content files and fts indexes will be removed from the original disk and free you up a whole load of space.

Note, if you want to be more granular with what you move, the following config elements let you define the paths for several parts of the 'alf_data' dir structure (just substitute your new locations):

dir.root=./alf_data

dir.contentstore=${dir.root}/contentstore
dir.contentstore.deleted=${dir.root}/contentstore.deleted

dir.auditcontentstore=${dir.root}/audit.contentstore

# The location for lucene index files
dir.indexes=${dir.root}/lucene-indexes
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Hope this helps,

Steve

[sacco]

Hi Steve,

A related issue:  how modular is the implementation of the contentstore layout?  i.e. in Zimbra (which uses a vaguely similar storage strategy), the location of content is found programmatically from attributes of the node.

Is there a simple way to alter the layout by adjusting a 'contentPath()' method somewhere, or does the implementation not abstract this conveniently?

[sacco]

mmilhome,

1)

Apparently the indexes cannot be on NFS at the moment:
http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=7124&highlight=nfs


2)

If you can't get the setup you need by moving the contenstore (and contentstore.deleted) onto the mapped drive (i.e. if you really need to split the contentstore), then you probably need to be on a Linux server with a recent-ish kernel.  In  this case you can move content from previous months onto, say, an NFS mounted disk on the other machine, and then assemble it back into the contentstore directory tree using something like:

mount  -t nfs otherhost:/otherdisk /mnt/otherdisk
mount –bind  /mnt/otherdisk/2006  /srv/alfresco/data/contentstore/2006
mount –bind  /mnt/otherdisk/2007/7  /srv/alfresco/data/contentstore/2007/7
mount –bind  /mnt/otherdisk/2007/8  /srv/alfresco/data/contentstore/2007/8‍‍‍‍‍

etc.

[mmilhome]

Thanks for the replies…
    But my problem is that I have many hard drives, but I can't install them, all in one server, so I am searching for a solution to aggregate all this hard drives that are on different servers, to look as one big hard.

I thought that I could configure alfresco to emulate that, but I see now that I will have to find another way to do that, and once this is made, point this ar the dir.root of alfresco…


I am currently testing this…
http://www.nas-central.org/index.php?title=Vblade_-_ATA_over_Ethernet

ATA over Ethernet (AoE)[1] is a network protocol developed by the Brantley Coile Company (now Coraid)[2], designed for accessing ATA storage devices over Ethernet networks. It gives the possibility to build SANs with low-cost, standard technologies.

With this, I can export all drivers to the alfresco machine, and use LVM to create a big drive, that actually is spread all over my network….


Thanks Again….
Marcus Milhomem