Understanding Publisher clustering

In high-demand environments, multiple Publisher computers can be configured in a cluster to improve rendering performance and to simplify the configuration of Publisher computers. Publisher clustering does not appreciably improve performance for publishing jobs that do not perform document rendering.

Note    Each Publisher computer in the cluster will claim an appropriate license as described in Understanding the licensing.

You should consider Publisher clustering when:

• More than one of the rendering modules will be used for many documents.
• Significant numbers of large documents will be rendered with different rendering modules.
• Only modest hardware resources are available for the Publisher computer but multiple computers are available.
• Large document renditions must be available as soon as possible after submission for rendering.

For example, if Publisher job A specifies the AutoCAD rendering module and job B specifies the Inventor rendering module and only one Publisher computer is configured, rendering many large files can take considerable time and place a high demand on hardware resources as AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor are repeatedly and alternately launched to perform rendering.

Publisher supports clustering by allowing each Publisher computer in the cluster to execute specific publishing jobs. One Publisher computer in the cluster, called the master, hosts the Publisher web service that delegates publishing jobs to the other computers, called subordinates, for rendering. The master Publisher computer can also act as a subordinate of itself and also perform rendering. An example of Publisher clustering is depicted in the following figure.

In this example, all client computer job submissions and queue management functions are processed by the Publisher master computer. Jobs that specify Publisher job A are executed on the Publisher master computer where job A is defined. Jobs that specify Publisher job B are executed on the Publisher subordinate computer where job B is defined, and so on for additional job definitions. Each Publisher computer executes its jobs asynchronously from the other Publisher computers, thereby allowing parallel rendering. Each Publisher job can specify the same or a different rendering module.

Note Publisher does not perform load balancing between the computers in the cluster. This means that the Publisher master computer cannot delegate publishing jobs to the next available subordinate computer. All job submissions for the same job definition will be executed on the computer where the job is defined, regardless of how many other computers are available. For this reason, if you want to distribute jobs between multiple Publisher computers, the jobs must be divided among separate source systems or divided among Publisher users (instruct groups of users to select different jobs in Meridian Enterprise).

To configure a Publisher cluster:

1. Install Publisher on each computer in the cluster as described in Installing components on the Publisher computer. You may install only those components on each computer that will be used by that computer. For example, on the subordinate computers, install only the rendering modules that will be specified in the jobs that will be defined on each computer.
2. Configure the BlueCielo Application Manager on each computer as described in Configuring the BlueCielo Application Manager.
3. Create and configure the publishing jobs on each computer as described in About publishing jobs.
4. Configure the web service address of the master computer in source systems as described in Configuring a Meridian Enterprise application server and Configuring the BlueCielo File Publishing Service.
5. If the Publisher will be used primarily for automatically generating renditions from multiple vaults and you want to distribute the jobs among the Publisher computers, specify the appropriate job in the Rendition job option of each vault's configuration as described in Configuring a Meridian Enterprise application server.
6. Assign the Publish Document privilege to the appropriate Meridian Enterprise roles as described in Assigning security privileges.