| Jive and High-Availability / Configuring Jive for High-Availability | |
Learn how to configure the Document Conversion server for a single or multiple data center HA configuration.
Jive gives end users the ability to upload Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF documents to the community for easy content sharing and collaboration. This Document Conversion service converts uploaded documents to a standard PDF format and then converts them again to Adobe Flash (.swf files) so that they can then be viewed in a web browser without needing to open the document's native software application.
The Document Conversion service must run on a separate node in the deployment because it consumes a significant amount of CPU and memory.
The application requires you to add a DNS name or IP address for the Document Conversion server deployed with the application. You set this connection string via the Admin Console: . This string is then stored in the core application databases. For more on what must be persisted in the core application database during a disaster recovery, see Restoring the Database With Persistent Properties.
You must enter a DNS name (preferred) or an IP address specifying the location of the Document Conversion server so that when an end user uploads one of the supported document conversion types to the community, the web application can first save the document to the storage service, and then send a request to the Document Conversion service to perform the conversion.
In both of the supported HA configurations (single data center and multiple data center HA configurations), Jive Software recommends that you configure the Document Conversion service with a DNS name that resolves to a machine local to that data center. For example, if you have web application nodes wa01-dcA.example.com and wa02-dcA.example.com, both in data center A, and web application nodes wa01-dcB.example.com and wa02-dcB.example.com in the data center B, all pointing to the DNS name conversion-service.example.com via the Admin Console setting, the name must resolve to the Document Conversion server conversion-service-dcA.example.com when requested by either wa01-dcA.example.com or wa02-dcA.example.com, and must resolve to conversion-service-dcB.example.com when requested by either wa01-dcB.example.com or wa02-dcB.example.com.
Additionally, because the Document Conversion service nodes are stateless, you can configure the service to live behind a load balancer, thereby making the Document Conversion server itself fault-tolerant. As an example, given the above scenario of two web nodes pointing to a DNS name conversion-service.example.com, you could configure the DNS name to use round-robin to load balance the requests across multiple Document Conversion service nodes, or it could resolve to the IP address of a load balancer, such as an F5 BIG-IP, which itself load balances and provides fault-tolerance across the Document Conversion services.