Oracle BI Publisher Cluster / HA
Oracle BI Publisheris J2EE application which can be deployed on OC4J or any application Server like Oracle Application Server, IBM Web Sphere, Apache, BEA Weblogic ….
Here is quick overview of clustering BI Publisher or Configuring High Availability
Options Available for clustering BI
1. HA (High Availability) – Also called as Active-Passive deployment where one node is active and other one is passive . Passive node becomes active in case first active node fails.
2. Load Balancing– Also called as Active-Active configuration where two more BI Publisher are front ended by Load Balancer which distribute load to various BI Publisher configured as part of Cluster.
Important Points for BI Publisher Clustering
1. Cluster members don’t share session information (also called as share nothing architecture)
2. Session stickiness should be configured i.e. once a client connection is made to a BI Publisher Server, all further connection should go to same BI Publisher server
3. All BI Publisher cluster member share same repository to store data
4. In case of Server failure, any Job running on failed server has to be restarted .
5. BI Publisher repository can be file based repository or Oracle XMLDB repository. For file based repository, file system (for repository) should be shared across cluster members.
6. Clocks on all servers participating in cluster should be synced with in one second difference.
7. Configure scheduler to operate in cluster node. (Use BI Publisher Administration screen)
8. Temp directory used to cache reporting data should NOT be shared across cluster members
Configuration Steps
1. Install BI Publisher on machine 1 (Follow BI Publisher installation doc)
2. Install BI Publisher on machine2
3. Configure Load Balancer in front of web server and reconfigure Web Server to use load balancer URL (Follow respective application server documentation)
4. Configure session stickiness in load balancer