Hi Joe,

I'm running on 2.3.5.3 MSSQL multi site mode and we are in the process of migrating to a virtual machine cluster; we have a failover server and a health probe that switches back and forth between our two server clusters based on server responsiveness. The main cluster replicates to the failover cluster every 15 minutes. 

Anywho, I've been migrating mojo sites to the cluster and a funny thing is happening; Session states are not being maintained.  This is problematic because when a Site Editor creates & publishes a new page in mojo, the display of content is out of whack (new pages not showing up) on pages that are hitting the failover server.  In about 15 minutes the replication occurs and both views match, but for that 15 minutes depending on what page you load, the display is incorrect and confusing.

This threw me off because I thought that content creation was being solely written to the database (so even if session state was not maintained the data would still be presented).  I looked in the web.config to see how session states are handled but didn't see <sessionState> present.

Can you please advise?

Thanks,

Beth

Thanks for explaining how the cache is currently working.  On a related note I'm trying to change the directory location for the site media directories so they are removed from the cluster.  I've been reading the neatUpload documentation but haven't figured out where I can change the default upload directory.  Any advice?

Thank you!

~ Beth

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the advice.  I'm going to use a virtual directory and create a service account to access the share in IIS.

One other question; where in the source code do you handle caching for page menus etc?  I'd like to try to shorten the cache time so that the delay in synchronization between our servers is minimized. I found some cache settings in the web.config but am thinking that is not the only place you have set cache times.

Thanks for your help,

Beth

In case someone else runs into the same issues, this is how I made mojoPortal work (meaning handling caching & file uploads) in a web farm with a failover server.

• created a service account with access to a file share not on the virtual machines.
• in IIS 7 created an app pool that runs through the service account and applied my mojo sites to that app pool
• created a virtual directories in mysite/data/sites/mysitenumber/ for 'media' and 'systemfiles'
• created those directories on the file share and deleted from the mojo installation
• made sure those virtual directories were running through the service account

With this in place I don't have to worry about some files getting uploaded to one server and some to the other (depending on which site the ACE module is serving) and also regardless of which server is being utilized, each time the cache dependency files are touched, they are immediately reflected in all locations.

Good luck,

Beth