You should first understand what Crowd Data Center is, and how it works. We've gathered some resources that will help you get to know the high-level overview of Data Center, and its architecture.

Take a look at Crowd Data Center.

You'll need two things to get started—an installer, and a license.

There's no special installer for Data Center—you just install Crowd, and then enable Data Center features in it.

As for the license, you can purchase it or get a trial.

A trial license gives you access to a full instance of Jira Data Center for 30 days. At the end of the trial period your Jira Data Center site will become read-only and you’ll have the option to buy a full license to continue using it, so you won’t lose any of your projects or data.

Supported platforms

Supported operating systems, databases, etc., are the same as for the Server installation, and you can see them here: Supported platforms. You need to use an external database—HSQLDB is not supported.

Node requirements

Those specific to Data Center include requirements for nodes that create the cluster:

• Each node is a separate machine (physical or virtual). They don't need to be identical, but should be as similar as possible for consistent performance.
• All nodes are running the same version of Crowd. You'll be copying Crowd from one node to another, so this shouldn't be a problem.
• They use the same timezone, and have the current time synced. You can use ntpd to set this up.
• All nodes share a common database, also installed on a separate machine.
• All nodes can access the shared home directory. You can set it up using NFS or a similar solution. We'll mention it in this guide.

Yes. Crowd Data Center relies on a load balancer to balance the traffic between the nodes, and this guide assumes that you already have one set up. You can use a load balancer of your choice, just make sure it meets these requirements:

• Supports "cookie based session affinity", also known as "sticky sessions".
• Can route HTTP/HTTPS traffic to one of the available nodes.
• Can determine whether a node is available or not, and route requests to other nodes if needed.
• All Atlassian applications and other REST clients must access your nodes through the load balancer.

Or you can just turn your proxy into a load balancer.

Many bigger installations of Crowd already have a reverse proxy configured, and many reverse proxies can do load balancing as well. We've provided some examples on how to use your proxy as a load balancer. See Load balancer examples.