Configuring Document Conversion server for high-availability
Here you can find how to configure the Document Conversion server for a single or multiple data center HA configuration.
Jive gives users the ability to upload Office and Adobe PDF documents to the community for easy content sharing and collaboration. The 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.
Setting up connection string
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 at . This string is then stored in the Core Application databases. For more information on what must be persisted in the Core Application database during disaster recovery, see Restoring 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 a 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, described in Supported Jive high-availability configurations, we recommend 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.