Load balancer support for FileNet P8

You can use different load-balancing strategies to manage requests to the Content Platform Engine, clients, and the database.

Content Platform Engine

Content Platform Engine is stateless and supports both hardware and software load balancers.

Depending on which of the two transports the client applications use to Content Platform Engine, certain restrictions apply. This table outlines the types of load balancing that can be used with Content Platform Engine for each transport.

Table 1. Content Platform Engine
Content Platform Engine clients Hardware load balancing (all protocols) Application Server load balancing HTTP-plugin load balancing Network Load Balancing feature in Windows Server

Web Services clients (CEWS transport: HTTP)

Yes No Yes Yes
Java clients (EJB transport: IIOP/T3/JNP) No (see Important note later in this section.) Yes No No
IBM® Administration Console for Content Platform Engine and other administrative applications Yes No Yes Yes
Content Platform Engine Web Services clients (CEWS transport: HTTP)
  • Pure web service clients
  • COM API clients (Capture)
  • .NET API clients
    • IBM Content Collector (ICC)
    • Sharepoint Connector
Custom applications can use any of the APIs shown above and require the same kind of load balancing.
Java clients (EJB transport: IIOP/T3/JNP)
  • Custom Java API clients when using EJB transport
IBM Administration Console for Content Platform Engine and other administrative applications
Important: To successfully configure your environment for Content Platform Engine high availability for clients that use the EJB Transport, you must use the EJB cluster URL of the application server for EJB client communication with Content Platform Engine. If you use a hardware load balancer between a client and Content Platform Engine that uses EJB transport, the load balancer performs only the initial JNDI lookup. The client then locks to an individual Content Platform Engine node, bypassing the load balancer.

Database

When Oracle RAC is used as the database service, load balancing is provided through the built-in capabilities of both the Oracle RAC client and SQL NET.