Oracle^® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Deployment Guide > Clustering, Load Balancing, and Failover in Oracle Business Intelligence >

Shared Files and Directories

The BI components deployed in a clustered environment must share certain files and directories as described below. A shared storage device such as NAS or SAN may be used.

NOTE:  On Windows, the BI services must run under a domain account in order to access network shares. Do not use the LocalSystem account.

• Presentation Catalog

  The BI Presentation Services instances in a cluster share a common Presentation Catalog. The Presentation Catalog should be placed on a shared NAS or SAN device. All instances of BI Presentation Services must have read and write access to the share.

  Because the Presentation Catalog consists of a large number of heavily accessed small files, there are two important considerations for the shared file system:

  • File Limits

    The Presentation Catalog can consist of thousands of files. In many cases this may exceed file limits for shared file systems. Check the storage vendor documentation for instructions on extending the file limit.

  • Snapshots

    Backup activity such as snapshots may adversely affect the performance of Presentation Catalog files which are small, dynamic files. Ensure that snapshot activity is at a reasonable level that maximizes performance without impacting availability.

• Repository Publishing Directory

  This directory is shared by all Oracle BI Servers participating in a cluster. It holds the master copies of repositories edited in online mode. The clustered Oracle BI Servers examine this directory upon startup for any repository changes.

  The Master BI Server must have read and write access to this directory. All other BI Servers must have read access.

• Cluster-Aware Cache

  The cluster-aware cache is a query cache that is shared by all BI Servers participating in a cluster. For more information, see the topic About Cluster-Aware Cache in this chapter.

  All BI Servers must have read and write access to the global cache directory.

• Scheduler Scripts

  A network share for the Scheduler scripts must be created. The Scheduler servers must have read and write access to this share.

  The following information applies to deployments with BI server components on Linux or UNIX platforms that access the above-mentioned shared files and directories on a NAS device from Network Appliance. For environments with BI server components on Linux or UNIX that use the NTFS security style, the recommended Network Appliance Data ONTAP storage operating system version is 6.3.1 or better.

  Linux or UNIX machines saving to an NTFS qtree in Data ONTAP versions 6.0.3 through 6.3 may see permission errors when trying to save designs. The following setting may be used that works to silently ignore attempts to set UNIX permission on NTFS qtrees after the design file is saved:

  options cifs.ntfs_ignore_unix_security_ops on