Minimal Configuration

Question

Hi,
we want to migrate one of our portlet-applications from our Weblogic Portal Server Platform to the new WebCenter Portal Plattform.
I know, that we have to rebuild our application using ADF, we are just on the way of doing this.
My question is:
What is the minimal configuration of a WebCenter Portal installation to deploy a normal/simple portlet to?
Our application uses nothing special, just a database connection and that's it.
Do I really have to install all these types of managed servers??
Do I need the analytics, the personalisation, the ...... or do I just need the portlet producer managed server????
What is the minimal configuration I need?
In the future we want to implement/install/use all of these managed servers but for the first cut, just the step to the new plattform, we want to reduce everything to the absolut minimum.
Is there an easy portlet which I can use to verify the installation??
Any help will be perfect.
Regards
Edmund

Answer 1

This is what Webcenter is (partially) designed for.
You don't need all the managed server from the beginning. Managed servers are a very good way of keeping a good scalability to your environment. Another advantage of managed servers is that you only need resources for what you need, other managed servers can be shut down.
In you case (from what i can read) I believe the best option is to have 3 managed servers (for a production environment):
1) Admin Server which contains the console and the enterprise manager
2) WebCenter Portal managed server. This managed server is not created by default. You should create it yourself. The idea of this server is to have a separate server to deploy your actual portal on.
3) Portlet managed server. This server will be used to deploy your portlets on.
These managed servers can of course be on a single machine or on a seperate machine. That's your choice.
The advantage of this setup is when the load on your portlet server is getting big, you can scale it out without harming the other servers.
if in a later phase, you want to use the analytics or personalization servers, you can easily switch them on. There is no need to have them all up and running from the beginning.
edit: you can also have one single managed server with all the applications for your portal and your portlets and the admin console and enterprise manager and so on but that would require some configuration on some applications to make it work. It's also not recommended because even for a very small project it is to heavy for a single managed server.
As a bare minimum i would say that 2 managed servers is ok. 1 for the admin and a second for both the portal and portlets.
Edited by: Yannick Ongena on Jan 6, 2012 3:36 PM