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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Installing HCL Digital Experience
Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
Planning to install HCL Digital Experience
Before you install HCL Digital Experience in a production environment, assess your hardware and software needs, possible database configurations, security options, and LDAP server options.
Cluster considerations
Multiple portal servers can be clustered with IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
  - Planning to install HCL Digital Experience
    Before you install HCL Digital Experience in a production environment, assess your hardware and software needs, possible database configurations, security options, and LDAP server options.
    - System requirements
      Before installing HCL Digital Experience, you must review the system requirements to ensure that you have the supported versions of prerequisite and co-requisite software and hardware.
    - Support Statement
      This support statement proposes a revision to the definition of supported and unsupported about the various products of which HCL Digital Experience depends on for proper operation.
    - User IDs and passwords
      Understanding character limitations for user IDs and passwords is important because they are used throughout the system to provide access and secure content.
    - Web Content Manager environments
      Reviewing the Web Content Manager environments help you understand what happens in each environment and how you might want to set up your physical servers.
    - Database considerations
      HCL Digital Experience includes an Apache Derby database that is configured and ready for immediate use. But for a production environment or any environment for HCL Web Content Manager, you must use one of the other supported database management systems.
    - User registry considerations
      A user registry or repository authenticates a user and retrieves information about users and groups to do security-related functions, including authorization.
    - HCL Digital Experience high availability
      HCL Portal Express offering is licensed for use in a single-server configuration and may not be used in either a cloned configuration or a clustered configuration except when implementing idle standby for the purpose of failover.
    - Cluster considerations
      Multiple portal servers can be clustered with IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment.
      - Guidelines for setting up a cluster
        When you set up a HCL Portal cluster, you must consider any planning that is required for the WebSphere Application Server nodes.
      - Limitations for setting up a cluster
        Certain limitations apply when you set up a HCL Portal cluster.
      - HTTP session failover
        View the global settings portlet to verify which server is handling user requests for a session.
      - Setting up an IBM i database in a cluster
        To communicate with a database, servers that run IBM i can use either of two JDBC drivers: the IBM Toolbox for Java JDBC driver or the IBM Developer Kit for Java JDBC driver (also referred to as the native JDBC driver). Which JDBC driver you must use depends on how you are setting up your clustered environment.
      - Security options
        Security is enabled by default for the WebSphere Application Server deployment manager.
      - Security scenarios
        Setting up a clustered environment requires that you consider the following two security scenarios.
      - Using external security managers in a cluster
        Complete any configuration for an external security manager after you have completed all other setup.
      - Planning for multiple clusters
        Multiple clusters are sets of servers that are managed together within a single administrative domain (or cell), and participate in workload management.
      - Dynamic clusters
        You can create a dynamic cluster to run HCL Portal.
      - Cluster maintenance
        Maintaining HCL Portal in a cluster typically means applying corrective services (fix packs and interim fixes) or updating the software release level on each node in the cluster.
    - Virtual environment overview
      Use virtualized environments to meet your business needs like production server consolidation, centralized management, or dynamic test environments.
    - Multiple profile support
      Multiple profiles give you the ability to have multiple, independently configured portal instances that run from the same installation.
  - Roadmaps to deploy your system
    Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
  - Migrating to IBM WebSphere Application Server 9.0.5
    If you are installing the latest version of HCL Digital Experience, migrate your IBM WebSphere Application Server to 9.0.5.
  - Installing and preparing the prerequisite software
    Before you install HCL Digital Experience, make sure that the prerequisite software is installed, configured, and has the required fix packs applied.
  - Installing the HCL Digital Experience software
    The HCL Digital Experience is designed to help create, manage, simplify, and integrate your processes into an engaging online experience.
- Configuring
  Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
- Backup and restore
  Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
- Migrating
  Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
- Integrating
  Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
- Administering
  Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
- Securing
  Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
- Monitoring
  HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
- Setting up a website
  Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
- Staging to production
  During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
- Developing
  This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Cluster considerations | HCL Digital Experience

Multiple portal servers can be clustered with IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment.

HCL Digital Experience comes standard with WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment, a distribution of IBM® WebSphere® Application Server that provides a Deployment Manager server type for centrally managing and clustering a series of servers. To cluster a series of portal servers means that all portal instances share configuration, including database, applications, and portlets, and site design. The cluster provides a domain against which most administrative actions are done once and synchronized with each server in the cluster. This action both simplify administration and ensure that all cluster members are configured and behave identically.

A server cluster also provides a shared domain in which session and cache data can be replicated and kept consistent across all members of the cluster. The cluster also provides an application synchronization mechanism that ensures consistent application management (start, stop, updates, and so on) across the cluster.

WebSphere® Application Server provides an HTTP Server plug-in that can balance user traffic across all members of the cluster. And through a feature called "session affinity", ensure that a user remains bound to a specific cluster instance during their session to improve efficiency and performance. Additionally, in the event a cluster member is down the workload management features of the plug-in recognizes that the instance is no longer available and route traffic around it.

There are two types of clusters: vertical and horizontal clusters. Most large-scale deployments are mixtures of both cluster types.

It is also possible to deploy multiple portal clusters to improve availability, failover, and disaster recovery.

It is recommended that you review the cluster guidelines and limitations topics for more information about what is involved in setting up a cluster.

Restriction: The serverName is hardcoded to HCL Portal. The serverName cannot be changed in a stand-alone environment. If you do change it, the ConfigEngine scripts do not work. For a clustered environment, see Virtual Member Manager integration for options on replacing the HCL Portal JVM.