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).
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.
A load balancer must be used in front of the cluster in order to distribute the load among the cluster nodes.
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.
There are several benefits from doing this separation:
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.
Component | Main Server | Integration Server | External Report Formatter (optional) | Contains |
Enterprise Explorer | X | IFS Enterprise Explorer, Streams, Lobby | ||
Integration Services | X | Batch, Connect, PL/SQL Access Provider | ||
Lobby Web Access | X | Lobby for Web | ||
Server (mandatory) | X | X | X | Server framework and interfaces |
Web Client | X | Web client |
By choosing what to deploy in Select Components to Deploy you can control the type of server/<ifs_home> you're about to install.