Configure Hardware Load Balancer at HTTP Server Layer

Hi, Atul,

I have a shared APPL TOP APPS structure of two nodes, we are using DNS F5BigIP load balancer(it seems to be the same as HTTP LB), but I found the two nodes’ Jserv Properties file has the same ports range defined, say, port=16750-16759(we do not use the conventional default port 8001/8007). If we are using Jserv LB, should we allocate the ports into two nodes? We have a F5 server using DNS LB, can you tell me the advantages and drawbacks of DNS and Jserv LBs?

We use session persistent(as most session will take long time, keeping them active over 2 hours) I found DB tiers are not load balanced well, one is pretty heat. I have a Plug-ins used with my grid control to monitoring the F5, but how can I figure out if LB works well or not?

Thanks a lot,

Hank

Hardware loadbalancer are always better and preferred over software loadbalancer as HW LB is stable and provide more configurations.

Your question about loadbalancer is not clear .

Do you want to check if LB is working or not meaning its transfering requests to both servers or not ?
If you wish to check this , check access_log on both servers and you should get hits on both web servers configured in pool of load balancer.

Atul,

Thanks a lot for the information.
I am using the shared top structure, so the access log from two nodes merged, I did find some seesions from some clients, but it hard to to tell which apps node were hit.

Hank

Have you modified access_log location in httpd.conf files from two nodes to same location ?

You can check for processes “ps -ef | grep httpd” to check if new connections are coming to both servers or not, if this is one time test. shutdown first middle tier & test and then second middle tier

Hi atul

i am using two nodes for oracle applications (forms,apache).now i want to configure oracle application with two url’s coz i am not using any bigip .
1)can i confgure two url’s in oracle applications for two nodes?
2) how can i loadbalnce without any bigip ?

please suugest us and give me configuration how to setup loadbalancer without using thirdparty loadbalancer or any native method in oracle applications for loadbalncer?

Thanks a lot

Sree

Sree,

Yes you can configure two url’s for two nodes both pointing to single instance using profile options and context file.

2) how can i loadbalnce without any bigip ?

Use any other supported software load balancer, one which I am aware is Oracle WebCache as load balancer in front of E-Business Suite

Hi Atul ,

Which H/ware balancer have you used . can u pls recommend some good h/ware load balancer which can be used with oracle apps ?

Sandeep We use F5 but you can ask hardware vendors for others

Is there any way from client side to ensure that we always connect to same server behind the load balancer.
I tried using IP address instead of domain name to do so but failed to get the contents from server.