Creating an Alfresco VMWare Appliance

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Creating an Alfresco VMWare Appliance
Jared Ottley Solutions Engineer www.alfresco.com
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Why build an Appliance?

• Consolidation
• Move to the Cloud
• Evaluation

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Advantages

• Simplicity
• Reuse
• Portability

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Reuse/Portability

• Reuse
• Test
• Development
• Production
• Portability
• Run it on multiple platforms
• And seriously...actual portability

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• How To

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Planning

• Know what you want to build
• Know your platform
• Windows vs. Linux
• VMWare vs. Parallels vs. XEN vs. KVM vs. ?
• Know your application
• What are the dependencies?
• Where will you store the data?
• Know how you/your users/your customers want to
  use it
• Evaluation
• Development
• Production

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Choosing your Platform

• Stay Legal!
• Linux
• Ubuntu JeOS
• OpenSuse LimeJeOS / SLES JeOS
• rPath
• Minimal Installs
• Windows
• Tools for stripping
• XPLite
• nLite
• Slimming Windows (www.bold-fortune.com)

WCM
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Sizing

• The VM Image
• Sharing
• Moving
• Data
• Where will your data be saved? (The Contentstore
  and Indexes)
• local (Always best for your Indexes)
• mounted (remote) filesystem
• NFS/CIFS
• iSCSI
• Directed Attached
• SCSI
• Fibre
• And all that metadata Database

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Tips

• Track everything
• Know what packages you add or remove
• Can you script this to make it easier to rebuild?
• Defrag/Resize your disk image often. Make sure
  you keep within your size requirements
• cat /dev/zero gt zero.fillsyncsleep 1syncrm -f
  zero.fill
• Even with minimal installs or JeOS distros there
  will be lots of things you don't need
• Remove unneeded packages
• Remove man pages, docs, extra languages
• Build the base Make a playground

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An Alfresco Appliance

• Run it from boot
• init scripts
• Advertise how to get to the Web Client
• Run as root or as another system user?
• I run as root
• why evaluation
• Why you shouldn't in production
• security
• considerations
• you will need to change ports for CIFS, FTP, NFS
• make sure you have the right rights
• DHCP vs Static
• Remember Where is all that data going?

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Resources

• Check out the 2.2 Enterprise Eval Appliance
• http//s3.amazonaws.com/alfresco-virtual-appliance
  s/alfresco-2.2-eval.zip
• Sample init script
• http//svn.ottleys.net/public/alfresco/init/ubuntu
  /alfresco
• Sample issue update script
• http//svn.ottleys.net/public/alfresco/appliance/u
  pdate-issue
• Sample Packaging scripts
• http//svn.ottleys.net/public/alfresco/appliance/
• Keep up with my Alfresco Appliance building
• http//jared.ottleys.net/tag/alfresco

Live Sites Using Alfresco
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Let's see it in action!
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Q A
Questions