About providing load balancing

Managing Discoverer in a Multi-Machine or Multi-Instance Environment 6-3 Figure 6–2 Discoverer topology for a multiple-instance environment

6.2 About Discoverer topologies in a multiple-machine or multiple-instance environment

A multiple-machine Discoverer environment is a deployment that contains two or more machines running a Discoverer installation. A multiple-instance Discoverer environment is a deployment that contains two or more instances on one or more machines running a Discoverer installation.

6.2.1 About providing load balancing

A typical multiple-machine Discoverer environment uses a standard commercial hardware router to distribute Discoverer Web traffic to multiple Discoverer middle tier machines. This is commonly known as load balancing. However, you can also provide load balancing using Oracle Web Cache as a proxy server to distribute Discoverer Web traffic to instances on the same machine or on other Discoverer middle tier machines. Load balancing improves Discoverer’s performance, scalability, and availability. For example, consider the topology in Figure 6–2 . In that environment, requests are sent from a Web browser that is running a Discoverer client application to Oracle Web Cache. Oracle Web Cache can distribute the requests to the Oracle HTTP Servers in each of the two instances. Those two instances can be running either on the same machine or on two different machines. In other words, you can have a single Discoverer URL for multiple Discoverer middle tier instances. For more information about using Oracle Web Cache to load balance, see Section 6.5.1, How to configure Oracle Web Cache for load balancing . Notes ■ You can also use the following types of multiple-machine and multiple-instance environments: ■ Software load balancer with high availability: This configuration provides load balancing with additional support for failure detection and failover of Oracle Web Cache servers. For more information about implementing high 6-4 Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuration Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer availability, see Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrators Guide for Oracle Web Cache. ■ Non-load balanced: This configuration is essentially several unconnected Discoverer middle-tier machines that operate independently. In other words, you have a different Discoverer URL for each machine. When you deploy Discoverer, you cannot configure components separately Discoverer Plus, Viewer, and Portlet Provider. You must configure all the components, but you can choose to disable certain components. For example, you might enable Discoverer Plus only on one machine and Discoverer Viewer only on another machine. ■ Hardware load balancer: This configuration distributes Discoverer Web traffic to multiple Discoverer middle tier machines. ■ When you configure Discoverer across multiple machines or multiple instances with load balancing, you also provide load balancing for other Oracle Fusion Middleware components on those machines or instances. For example, you can also configure Oracle Portal with load balancing. ■ To provide a consistent Discoverer interface to end users, when you configure Discoverer across multiple machines or multiple instances with load balancing, ensure that each machine has the same configuration settings for example, user interface customizations and timeouts.

6.2.2 About using Fusion Middleware Control to manage multiple machines