Over the last while my colleague Amanda and I have been collecting information to guide people through the upgrade to Sitecore 8 and plan for the new xDB. There are a lot of scenarios to consider and new scaling options available to you. Provided below are the collection of resources we’ve been able to put together so far.

Sitecore 8 Upgrades

Before even delving into xDB, you’ll need to get onto Sitecore 8 first. There are a few things to look out for in when making the jump from Sitecore 6, or  Sitecore 7, to Sitecore XP 8.

1. 3 Tips: Preparing for a Sitecore Upgrade
2. Making the case for Sitecore upgrades
3. Sitecore 8 Upgrade: Thar be dragons!
4. Upgrading to 7.5/8
5. Sitecore 7 Upgrade considerations (helpful if upgrading from 6.x to 8)
6. Upgrading to 7.5/8
7. Sitecore 7 Search implications to upgrade (again good for jumps from 6.x)

xDB infrastructure planning

When planning out your Sitecore 8 footprint, you will now need to consider how you will license and scale out the xDB components. This includes the collection database, processing servers, session state servers, and reporting services. In most production scenarios, you will likely introduce SOLR to manage the reporting index. The numerous components involved can be confusing, but these guides should help you get started:

1. Unlock the power of the xDB (webinar)
2. xDB decision tree (deciding on licensing model)
3. Planning your Sitecore xDB Infrastructure (whitepaper)

Mongo production infrastructure

Installing a single instance of MongoDB for your development and test environments is very simple. In fact, you can use the latest Sitecore Instance Manager (v1.4) to do it for you! However, when you start discussing the infrastructure for a production environment there can be a lot of terminology that gets thrown at you: arbiters, primary/secondary instances, replica sets, shards, etc. My personal preference is to use a Mongo as a Service cloud solution like MongoLab, but your situation may require you to bring the data into your own environment. The Mongo website has a lot of great resources to help you get an idea of how you can deploy your Mongo footprint in your data center(s). The following should guide you in understanding typical production scenarios and multi-data center deployments:

1. Replica set architectures
2. Replica set arbiter
3. Data center awareness
4. Operational Segregation
5. Geographic Distribution
6. Deploying geographically redundant replica set
7. Multi-Data Center Deployments (whitepaper)

Getting started? Got a question? Let me know!