We currently have a single installation multi-site setup, hosted in Europe, and are looking to move content delivery for a single site to China. This is partly for SEO purposes and partly to improve content delivery performance there. Content management performance isn’t an issue.
Given that we’ll be having to transfer data between two separate hosting companies we’d like to limit both how much gets sent, and if possible not send any data we wouldn’t be happy to publish.
We have Sitecore analytics enabled, so this might be a complicating factor.
I’ve read the scaling guide, which suggests we’ll need a minimum of both web and core databases in the new CD environment. They do suggest that if there is no extranet security configured it is possible to do without the core database in a pure CD environment.
Does anyone have any experience with this? What are the benefits/pitfalls? What is the bare minimum installation we can get away with?
Edit: Sitecore.NET 6.4.1 (rev. 111003)
Like divamatrix said, knowing the version number is essential.
But even though the older versions can run without the Core, I would stick to an installation that includes the Core so you will have less trouble upgrading in the future.
What you need on the Content Delivery side is:
Then on the Content Management side you need your usual:
Then setup SQL replication between the Core databases.
Analytics can be configure to run reports using data from CD and store them on CM.
You also need to setup Web Deployment for file replication between the instances.
Besides all this you need some extra configuration as is explained in the Scaling Guide.
If you are not using Sitecore 6.4 or higher, I would recommend upgrading first. Once you got this setup properly it will work like a charm!