Portal Server on an Application Server Cluster
Running Portal Server on an application server enables you to:
•Decouple the portal platform from the application server platform, allowing you to choose the best combination of Portal Server and application server for your organization
•Call Enterprise JavaBeans™ architechture and other J2EE™ technologies that run in the application server container
•Use application server clustering, which provides scalability and high availability
•Use session failover in clustering (currently available on BEA WebLogic Server™ and Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition).
Portal Server on an Application Server Cluster
This section describes how Application Server Enterprise Edition software, BEA WebLogic Server™, and IBM WebSphere® Application Server manage application server clustering. Application server clustering is a loosely coupled group of application servers that collaborate to provide shared access to the services that each server hosts. The cluster aims to balance resource requests, high availability of resources, and failover of application logic to provide scalability. Portal Server and Access Manager are not pure web applications. Instead, these applications are composed of local files residing on a machine and three web applications: portal, amserver, and amconsole. These three web applications run in a web application container, which runs in an application server web application container.
The Java Enterprise System installs and configures the local files, configures the local application server, then deploys the three WAR files on the local web application container. The WAR files themselves are not
An application server cluster is a logical entity that groups many application server instances, potentially hosted on different machines. Pure web applications are deployed on a cluster using application server specific deployment tools. Once deployed on the cluster, the web applications are deployed to all the server instances that the cluster is made of, and managed in a central way.
Because of Portal Server’s dual nature, as a local application as well as a web application, install Portal Server on an application server using the following steps:
1.Install Portal Server on all machines using the same configuration settings.
