web 8

This April saw the return of the UK SDL Web Meetup in Manchester which seems to be a hotbed of Tridion talent. It had only been 3 years since the last one…

First up to speak was Rob Stevenson-Legget from Building Blocks who spoke about how to set up your DD4T or DXA web application in docker containers.

Rob Stevenson-Legget from Building Blocks

It was a really interesting talk especially as using docker containers seem to be the in thing at the moment. Using it for 2013 SP1 seems to be working well and I look forward to his next talk where he has it working perfectly for SDL Web 8.5.

Second up was Jonathan Williams from Stage Two who spoke about his experience scaling SDL Web 8 in Production. It was great to hear some real world issues and see some people watching nod along as they had the same issues.

Last up was Bart Koopman, one of the Product Managers for SDL Web, and he presented a roadmap of DXA.

Bart Koopman from SDL

This talk was the one with the most audience participation which was great to see. The roadmap looks good but the key to the success has to be it’s community involvement, taking feedback from those people who have implemented DD4T and DXA many times before.

You can watch at listen to the whole meetup here (including the beer and pizza breaks): https://recordings.join.me/TPTrIZjwZUmKhfvq7nEtBg

Thanks to Stage Two for providing the refreshments and to SpaceportX for providing the free space to us.

If you would like to attend the next Meetup then make sure you get signed up. If you would like to talk then please connect with me on LinkedIn.

SDL Tridion is a hugely scalable product and so when I wanted to scale out the Publisher onto it’s own dedicated machine I thought the steps to do this would be easy to find so I searched the online manual for the steps but all I found was one single paragraph:

You can install the Publisher on one or more dedicated machines. On a dedicated machine, you can configure the Publisher for a multiprocessor machine, or increase the number of Publisher threads. You can also create Publishers that only accept content from certain Publications or Publication Targets, or with a certain Publish Priority.

Woo hoo! That’s exactly what I need! But that was it…. nothing else on that page?

So if anyone else is looking for the steps to install the Publisher on a dedicated machine, here are the steps I followed:

Transfer the Content Manager install files to your new server
Double Click and Run the Installer
Select only the Content Delivery Windows Services, Content Manager and Context Expressions features
Complete all your user account and database details that you completed when you initially installed your Content Manager
Complete the details for the Content Manager website
Transfer your license files into the correct locations just like you did with your Content Manager installation
Restart the server

The core Content Manager components have now been installed on your new server but you only need a few of the Windows Services. To complete the setup you need to:

Stop and Disable the Tridion Content Manager Workflow Agent Service, the Tridion Content Manager Service Host Service, the Tridion Content Manager Search Indexer and the Tridion Content Manager Batch Processor Service
Transfer your cd_transport_conf.xml file from your Content Manager Server to the same location on the new Publisher Server. Restart the Tridion Content Distributor Transport Service.

The new Publishing server is now ready to publish but you need to log on to the Content Manager server to stop it doing the Publishing. On the Content Manager Server:

Stop and Disable the Tridion Content Manager Publisher Service and the Tridion Content Distributor Transport Service

You should now be able to publish an item from the CME and the new Publishing Server will pick it up and transport it to your Deployer.

Ryan Durkin's Blog

Freelance .Net Web Developer and SDL Tridion Consultant

SDL Web UK Meetup April 2017

Scaling SDL Tridion 2013 – Installing the Publisher on a dedicated machine