Making the Application Server Highly Available

Identity Manager can run within an application server cluster and take advantage of the added availability and load balancing that a cluster provides. Identity Manager does not use any J2EE features that require clustering, however.

Identity Manager uses the HTTP Session object that is available through the Servlet API. This session object tracks a user's visit as the user logs in and performs actions. In a cluster, you can optionally have multiple nodes handle a user's requests during a given session. This is usually not recommended, however, and most installations are configured to send a user's entire request for a given session to the same server.

It is possible to add additional availability and capacity to the application server running Identity Manager even if you do not set up a cluster. This is achieved by installing multiple application servers with Identity Manager, connecting them to the same repository, and putting a load balancer with session affinity in front of all the application servers.

For more information on session affinity, see Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Session Affinity and Session Persistence.

Identity Manager runs certain tasks in the background—for example, scheduled reconciliation tasks. These tasks are stored in the database and can be picked up by any Identity Manager server to run. Identity Manager uses the database to ensure that these tasks are always run to completion, even if it has to fail over to another node.

Configuring Active Sync Clustering on Application Server Nodes

The sources.hosts setting in the Waveset.properties file controls which hosts in a multi instance environment are used for executing Active Sync requests. This setting provides a list of hosts that source adapters can run on. Setting this to localhost or null will allow source adapters to execute on any host in the web farm. (This is the default behavior.) By listing one or more hosts, you can restrict execution to that list. If you have inbound updates from another system that go to a particular host, use the sources.hosts setting to record the host names.

In addition, you can define a property named sources.resourceName.hosts, which controls where the resource's Active Sync task will run. Replace resourceName with the name of the resource object you wish to specify.