High Availability and Scalability

High Availability (HA) and Scalability requires planning when it comes to deployment structure and there are a number of things that needs to be considered and performed before starting to install IFS Applications if aiming for a true HA solution and/or scalable deployment.

From an HA and scalability aspect there are two parts of IFS Applications that each need their separate approach, the storage tier (i.e. the Oracle database) and the middle tier (i.e. the application server).

Storage Tier / Oracle Database

Please refer to Oracle documentation for detailed information about HA and scalability aspects and instructions on how to set up an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) for instance.

Middle Tier / Application Server

Load Balancer

A load balancer must be used in front of the cluster in order to distribute the load among the cluster nodes.

Separating Integration and Reporting processing away from interactive client requests

It is possible to configure the system to achieve isolation between client requests, report rendering and integration processing by setting up a Main Server for interactive clients, an Integration Server for IFS Connect and an External Report Formatter for reporting.

Example system with Integration and Reporting separated from interactive clients. The Integration Server takes care of all Integration processing, the Main Server all interactive client requests and the External Report Formatter rendering of all reports.

• Main Server
  The main application server that will serve all client requests (IFS EE and Web Client). Every client will connect to this application server URL. All administration functions performed via Solution Manager should be done using this application server. This can be a cluster of application servers or a standalone server. By default the main server will be a complete installation to also include Integration and Report formatting but with the two scenarios below this can also be separated.
• Integration Server
  The application server that will serve all the IFS Integrations and Connect services. Connect Server and Batch Processor will execute on this server machine and will point to this application server. PL/SQL Access Provider will also point to this application server. External Web Service clients should always invoke IFS Web Service endpoints exposed using this server. Read more about Install Separate Integration Server
• External Report Formatter
  This is the application server installation that will service operational reporting function. Read more about Install External Report Formatters

There are several benefits from doing this separation:

• Separate machine and application server sizing and tuning - size for a single use case rather than three distinctly different.
• Any type of problem in one of these separated areas would have no effect on the others - if the Integration Server goes down this will have no impact on IFS Enterprise Explorer users.
• Possibility to use staging when applying middle-tier patches. The Integration Server can be patched and/or reconfigured without affecting interactive clients and vice versa.

Both the Main Server and the Integration Server installations can be clustered. Both horizontal and vertical clustering is possible.
An Integration Server will process IFS Connect jobs (only this server will run the Batch Processor) and should be used to expose Web Service endpoints. The PL/SQL Access Provider will be configured to send any requests to outbound bizAPIs to the Integration Server.

By choosing what to deploy in Select Components to Deploy you can control the type of server/<ifs_home> you're about to install.