Before you decide for a portal installation with multiple
virtual portals, you need to determine your specific business requirements
and the purpose of your portal. This can help you decide, whether
virtual portals are a valid solution for your requirements, or whether
it is better for you to use multiple real portals. Consider and answer
the questions in the following sections.
- Using virtual portals versus multiple real portals:
- The main benefit of virtual portals consists in sharing several
resources between the virtual portals. Rather than having one each
of these resources for each portal, all virtual portals use the same
single instance of such a resource. This reduces the administrative
overhead and optimizes the resource usage. Typically, virtual portal
share the following resources:
- the JVM
- portlets and other code fragments
- the database.
Additional to the benefit of sharing these resources, the virtual
portals can be scaled to a large extent, and you can host a large
number of virtual portals on a single portal installation. For a
complete list of the resources that virtual portals share see Separating
and sharing resources between virtual portals. On the other
hand, sharing resources can creates dependencies between virtual portals.
For example, if one of the virtual portals requires maintenance, all
virtual portals are affected by the outage and undergo the same maintenance
updates. If you can accept such dependencies in your business environment,
virtual portals are a simple and cheap solution for you. Otherwise
you have the alternative of using multiple real portal installations.
For more details see Alternative concepts for virtual portals
on WebSphere Portal.
- Sharing or separating virtual portal administration:
- Do you plan to have each virtual portal administered by its own
group of administrators, or will you have a central administration
group for the entire portal installation and all virtual portals ?
You can select a specific group of sub-administrators, who
can manage the resources and users of a particular virtual portal.
The master administrator of the portal installation can set up
the privileges of the sub-administrators individually for each virtual
portal.
If you do not require a specific sub-administrator group
for each virtual portal, the portal administrators can share the administrative
work for all virtual portals.
- Sharing or separating user populations:
- Does each virtual portal need its own separate user population,
or can all virtual portals share the same single user population ?
To ensure that only members of a dedicated user population
can access a virtual portal, use the realm concept provided by the
Virtual Member Manager (VMM). VMM is available as a built in user
registry in WebSphere® Application
Server.
This security concept is known as Federated security.
If all
your virtual portals can use the same user population, you can configure
either of the following:
- A WebSphere standalone LDAP as the security environment
- Federated security with a single realm. This realm can contain
users and groups from one or more repositories.