Overview of the SRA Gateway Module

The SRA Gateway module of the reference configuration deployment architecture illustrated in Figure 2–2consists of two Sun Java System Portal Server Secure Remote Access (SRA) Gateway instances running on two different computers, with additional, optional Rewriter Proxy and Netlet Proxy components residing on the computers hosting Portal Server instances. The module makes use of a hardware load balancer that is configured to provide SRA Gateway service failover capability between the two Gateway instances. All external Internet requests for portal services are addressed to the virtual service name and IP address of the Gateway service load balancer. The load balancer directs each request to one of the Gateway instances.

The Access Manager SDK library is required for each Gateway instance because the Gateway service and Gateway profile are stored as Access Manager services in Directory Server. The Netlet Proxy and Rewriter Proxy instances are accessed directly by the Gateway instances by using a round-robin scheduling algorithm.

The architecture of the SRA Gateway module is shown in the following illustration.

Figure 7–1 SRA Gateway Module

The general approach to implementing this module is to first set up a Gateway profile for the SRA layer. Each Portal Server instance is then configured for SRA operation, after which the Gateway instances themselves are set up. Following these procedures, load balancing is implemented to provide Gateway service failover.

This module can be scaled horizontally by adding an additional computer like sra2 and its respective components, and following the instructions in this chapter that apply to sra2.

When you install and configure the SRA Gateway module, you configure it to interoperate with the other modules in the reference configuration. This chapter describes the procedures for implementing the SRA Gateway module in the following sections.

The procedures in this chapter use the host names, domain name, and IP addresses shown in Figure 3–1 and Figure 7–1. However, you must map these host names, domain name, and IP addresses to equivalent names and addresses in your environment. For this reason, the procedures in this chapter show host names, domain name, and IP addresses as variables.