You can configure IBM HTTP Server or another reverse proxy
server for load balancing and failover handling in federated environments.
Instead of incoming HTTP requests going directly to Process Federation Server,
they go to the IBM HTTP Server or reverse proxy server, which then
distributes the requests across multiple Process Federation Servers
that perform the work.
About this task
The following figure shows an example of a configuration
topology for a production environment that includes load balancing
with IBM HTTP Server:
Although Process Federation Server is
based on WebSphere Application Server Liberty Network Deployment,
a cluster of process federation servers does not require a configured
Liberty collective or the clusterMember-1.0 feature
on each process federation server. While a Liberty collective can
help to administer multiple servers, it is not necessary for a cluster
of process federation servers. The following procedure assumes that
a Liberty collective is not configured.
Procedure
Although the specific configuration steps might differ
depending on your environment, the following procedure can help you
implement workload balancing and failover with IBM HTTP Server.
- Install IBM HTTP Server and configure a web server plug-in
for the IBM HTTP Server.
Follow steps 1 - 7 for the
installation and configuration on WebSphere Application Server Liberty
Network Deployment:
Configuring a web server plug-in for
the Liberty profile.
Tips:
- Use the WebSphere Customization Toolbox to configure the web server
plug-in for IBM HTTP Server.
- Generate a plugin-cfg.xml plug-in file for
each Process Federation Server in
your environment.
- Merge the plugin-cfg.xml files into
one plugin-cfg.xml plug-in file for the federated
environment.
Attention: Because the federated
environment configuration does not use Liberty collectives, you cannot
use the ClusterManager MBean generateClusterPluginConfig operation
to generate the merged plugin-cfg.xml file.
To
merge the files, use the
pluginCfgMerge tool or
manually merge them. For more information, see
Configuring simple load balancing across
multiple application server profiles.
- Copy the merged plugin-cfg.xml file
to IBM HTTP Server.
- Secure IBM HTTP Server.
For a secure federated
environment, ensure that you configure at least the following security
aspects.
- Configure the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol on
IBM HTTP Server.
- Configure the IBM HTTP Server to trust the Process Federation Server certificate
by importing the Process Federation Server signer
certificate into the IBM HTTP Server truststore.
