Bare minimum for a Sitecore content delivery set-up

1
votes

We currently have a single installation multi-site setup, hosted in Europe, and are looking to move content delivery for a single site to China. This is partly for SEO purposes and partly to improve content delivery performance there. Content management performance isn't an issue.

Given that we'll be having to transfer data between two separate hosting companies we'd like to limit both how much gets sent, and if possible not send any data we wouldn't be happy to publish.

We have Sitecore analytics enabled, so this might be a complicating factor.

I've read the scaling guide, which suggests we'll need a minimum of both web and core databases in the new CD environment. They do suggest that if there is no extranet security configured it is possible to do without the core database in a pure CD environment.

Does anyone have any experience with this? What are the benefits/pitfalls? What is the bare minimum installation we can get away with?

Edit: Sitecore.NET 6.4.1 (rev. 111003)

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sitecoresitecore6
Just so I understand this better. Are you looking for a team in China to be able to edit content or just pure delivery of published pages ? Also where are the databases hosted in this scenario, shared or along with each site ? - Stephen Pope
Pure content delivery of published pages in China, all editing against the CM set-up in Europe (as is currently the case). Where the databases should be is pretty much the question I'm asking :-) - James Walford

2 Answers

1
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Like divamatrix said, knowing the version number is essential. But even though the older versions can run without the Core, I would stick to an installation that includes the Core so you will have less trouble upgrading in the future.

What you need on the Content Delivery side is:

  • Web database
  • Core database
  • Analytics database

Then on the Content Management side you need your usual:

  • Master database
  • Web database
  • Core database
  • Analytics database

Then setup SQL replication between the Core databases. Analytics can be configure to run reports using data from CD and store them on CM.

You also need to setup Web Deployment for file replication between the instances.

Besides all this you need some extra configuration as is explained in the Scaling Guide.

If you are not using Sitecore 6.4 or higher, I would recommend upgrading first. Once you got this setup properly it will work like a charm!

1
votes

To answer your question, older versions of Sitecore worked without the Core database. You didn't say which version of Sitecore you're using, but if it's anything current, the answer is going to be that you need a web database and a core database. Also, having analytics enabled is definitely a consideration you need to look at. You should probably look at setting up an your analytics database local to your CD hosting as this database can see a lot of traffic depending on the traffic of your site. You can have publishing set up to either publish to a local web database and then replicate or you can just let publishing should handle the transfer of data between your CM and CD environment.