I am looking to build a very large joomla site using multi sites & virtuemart.

• About 60,000 products
• About 5000 categories
• About 15 sites

Am I correct in thinking that if I set up a master site, a template and then create a slave and create children off it?

Am I able to display different products on different slave sites?

If I share the virtue mart table does it create all the products again in the database for each slave site or does it just save 1 copy of the products for all 15 sites to access?

Is it possible to run 1 checkout for all 15 sites or will they all have their own checkout page?

Any other tips you could provide us with in the set up of this would be helpful?

YES you can create 15 websites.
If you make the website totally independent, they will have their own MySQL table and therefore their own content.
So you will not see the content of the other website (ie. you will not see the VM products from the other websites).

If you want to share the VirtueMart (or any extension), this mean that the content (the mysql tables) exists only once.
The data is NOT replicated in the other slave site. There is just a link between the MySQL tables.

If you want to have a single check-out this suppose that you share the VirtueMart and also that the 15 websites are either a subdomain or a subdirectory of a same domain.
The session (and single sign-in) can only be shared when using the same domain.

So the key element is to know if you want to share the VM content between the 15 website (including the users) or keep the website content totally independent.

So if we want to share the vm tables across the 15 sites which user option do we need to share so the users can login and buy from any of the 15 sites?

If you want to share the users and allow them buy from any website, you need to use the "Single Sign-In" to share the sessions where the shopping cart is saved.
So your websites must use the same domain name.
They can either be subdomain or subdirectories of a same domain.

When sharing VirtueMart, this also share the users.

See video 16 that show how to share the users. This is the same to share VirtueMart.
www.jms2win.com/en/tutorial#jms12x-16

Hello,

I've started building this but I am having problems creating the "Children" websites,

There's a error to do with been unable to connect to the database.

Any ideas why this would be?

I've created

- Site
- Slave
- Sharing Rule Template

But get a database connection error when I try create a site from the share template rule I created?

Thanks

If you have a problem to connect the DB, verify the parameters that you specified in the template rule.
You probably make a mistake somewhere.

Perhaps you could start replicating the website into the same DB with a different table prefix.
Once you will be OK with all the parameters except the DB one then retry in modifying the DB connection parameters.