We are looking at our current Liferay deployment for improvement in the near future. We'd like to move to where we use instances more.
We currently have a few sites in the default instance. The model we'd like to follow in the future is to - use the default instance for super/global administrator use only. Then create instances with different domains for different audiences/users and that they can be administered by different administrators/groups separately.
Does anyone know how can we move our sites and its related data to another Liferay instance? Is this easy and doable? Are there clearly defined steps and options for this process? Are there any risks to moving the data?
Thanks for the insight.
instances mean that there's nothing shared between the sites. Well, there actually is something: As you're running on the same appserver, so you're sharing all the code, all plugins.
For this reason you might not be as isolated as you want to be. Administration typically is a bit more tricky, as every single instance needs its own virtual host and its own user database (or LDAP connection). The shared plugins might limit you as to what customization you can do with Liferay.
Quite a few times I've seen expectations to "restart" the instance, which seems legit, as a customer is the only one on that instance. However, this quickly leads to accumulated maintenance windows for all instances that are not clearly visible to other customers.
In general you can use site's import and export, e.g. export to a LAR file and import into a new site on a new server in a different instance. You'll find the Import/Export UI in the site administration UI, along with the page administration.