Portal Server and Access Manager on Different Nodes
Figure 5-9 shows a configuration for maximum horizontal scalability and higher availability achieved by a horizontal server farm. Two Portals Servers can be fronted with a load balancer for maximum throughput and high availability.
Another load balancer can be put between Portal Servers and Access Managers to achieve authentication and policy processes as a load distributor and failover mechanism for higher availability.
In this scenario, Blade 1500s can be utilized for Portal Services to distribute the load, similar Blades can be used to host Access Manager Services and Directory Services respectively. With the architecture shown in Figure 5-9 a redundancy of services exists for each of the product stack, therefore, most of the unplanned downtime can be minimized or eliminated.
However, the planned downtime is still an issue. If an upgrade or patch includes changes to the Directory Server software schema used by the Access Manager software, all of the software components must be stopped to update the schema information stored in the Directory Server. However, updating schema information can be considered a fairly rare occurence in most patch upgrades.
Figure 5-9 Two Portal Servers and Two Access Managers
Portal
Server
Load | Load |
Balancer | Balancer |
Portal
Server
Access
Manager
Server
Access
Manager
Server
Directory
Server
Directory
Server
When two instances of Portal Server and Access Manager servers share the same LDAP directories, please use this workaround for all subsequent Portal Server, Access Manager, and Gateways:
Chapter 5 Creating Your Portal Design 109
