Windows Azure Pack Multiple Theming Overview
Applies To: Windows Azure Pack
This section shows how you can support multiple customers with different themes and IIS bindings on a single Azure Pack tenant portal.
As an example, suppose a hosting company named Contoso has an Azure Pack private cloud with two customers (here called customer1 and customer2).
Let's say customer1 is a hosting company that wants to offer its own customers the services provided by Contoso, through a portal located at https://www.customer1.com, styled with its own customized theme.
Let's say customer2 is an enterprise that wants to provide Contoso's services to various internal departments through a portal located at https://www.europe.customer2.com, also styled with its own theme.
Azure Pack lets you add multiple IIS bindings and themes on the same tenant portal website to support both customers' needs, and can be configured to treat the customers as different entities both in the portal and on the API layer.
There are several reasons why this solution would be desirable:
The infrastructure footprint is low. If you need more than three or more domains, the infrastructure cost for maintaining multiple tenant portals goes up steeply.
Load-balancing is easier. You don't have to maintain different load balanced instances of the tenant portal because you can set up one portal in HA and load-balance the combined load.
Scaling can be shared. As long as your customers don’t have different scaling requirements, they can all use the same portal instance and you can scale that service uniformly.
Data storage is consolidated. Because all the data lives within the context of a single portal, you don't have to maintain data solutions on multiple portals.
There are four main steps required to set up multiple theming:
Add bindings in IIS for the different customers on the tenant portal website..
Copy the different customer themes into the Content folder of the tenant portal website.
Modify the WAP configuration databases to accommodate the new domain names.
Note Because this is a somewhat complex configuration, we recommend that you take snapshots before and after this step in case you need to revert.
Set up trust with your identity provider.
Multiple Theming is supported beginning in the UR2 release of Azure Pack.
You need to have an identity provider that supports multiple relying parties. For this reason, the ASP.NET Membership Provider won't work in this context. The example presented here uses Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) as the identity provider, but does not go into how to set up AD FS. If you need help doing this, you can find guidance in Federated Identities to Windows Azure Pack through AD FS, Part 1, and if you need help setting up relying party trusts with AD FS, see Federated Identities to Windows Azure Pack through AD FS – Part 2.
This example assumes that you already have distinct themes for the different customers. For help in creating themes, see Windows Azure Pack Custom Theming Overview.
We are also assuming here that your DNS is already set up, and the domains in question are already pointing to your tenant portal machine. Please verify that you can access those domains on that machine before going further, to save time troubleshooting later.