Load Balancing

The installtion documentation indicates that you must make sure that each front end web server points to a network share with the Sitefinity project.   I'm curious what specific features require this?  Is it caching, search indexing, uploading images, etc?  What would happen if we deployed the codebase to each individual server??

We currently don't have a high availability NAS available where this code will be deployed.  I'd like to know the implications of deploying the code to each individual server.

Hello Shawn,

It is not necessary to use one single file system but we do not make anything about the synchronization of the file system , that is the reason why we recommend to use central place for file storage.  One of the alternatives is to use DFS or 3rd party tool that synchronize the file system, because our code will not handle this scenario properly.

Regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

What are the common actions in Sitefinity that would make changes to the file system?  Uploading a master page, css, javascript, editing configuration, etc.??? 

Some of these might not be applicable to us because we won't be adding new master pages or CSS files to production.  They will be promoted from test during our release process. 

Basically, the only end users in production will be content writers.  In this scenario is Sitefinity writing anything to the file system in the normal day to day operations of content/page creation?

Hi Shawn,

The main changes to the file system are related to the Configurations, Search and errors logging. If someone changes something inside Administration >> Settings this will write to the configurations. When  a search index is created this also updates App_Data/Sitefinity/Search folder. If an error is thrown we write a new log entry in App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs.

Greetings,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team