I'm in the last stages of launching a SP2010 project that will be a public facing website. I've got my Staging environment all fleshed out and done with content and everything. Development environment is a mirror copy of Staging at this point (used backup and restore). Now I need to create my Production environment so I can configure content deployment from Staging to Production.
We're pretty small, so our topology looks like this: Development isolated on a server of its own with SQL installed; Staging on a server of its own with SQL installed; Production on a server of its own, but without SQL installed and pointing to the Staging server where its DB will be stored. I was told by a developer working with us some time back that this was the way to go for us considering our resources. I'm a bit confused on how this works though.
I ran through the install and when I get to the DB portion it wants to share the config DB that Staging is using. This seemed wrong for what I wanted to accomplish, but I rolled through it to see what would happen. So far, that definitely seems to not be what I want. It's just loading content from Staging and there isn't a separate Central Admin for Production. It's just using the same one as Staging even though I thought I told it not to (advanced settings), so I'm rolling back my snapshots to start over.
Here's what I'm trying to accomplish: our end-users login to the Staging environment and author content there. Once approved through a custom workflow, a content deployment job kicks off every night to move published content over to the Production environment. Pretty standard. How do I set up this Production environment?
I've done some searching, but oddly can't find a guide for this specific scenario. Any help or links?