Planning the Installation and Configuration

Answer the following questions before you start your installation.

• Will you run HA for Oracle iPlanet Web Server as a failover or as a scalable data service? See the Oracle Solaris Cluster Concepts Guide document for information on the two types of services. For scalable services, consider the following questions.

  • What nodes will host the scalable service? In most cases, you will want to scale across all nodes. You can, however, limit the set of nodes that host the service.

  • Will your Oracle iPlanet Web Server instances require sticky IP? Sticky IP is a resource property setting, Load_balancing_policy, which stores the client state in memory so that return traffic from the same node always goes to the same cluster node. You can choose from several load balancing policies. See the r_properties(5) man page for details.

    Exercise caution when you change Load_balancing_weights for an online scalable service that has Load_balancing_policy set to LB_STICKY or LB_STICKY_WILD. Changing those properties while the service is online can cause existing client affinities to be reset, and hence a different node might service a subsequent client request even if another cluster member had previously serviced the client.

    Similarly, when a new instance of the service is started on a cluster, existing client affinities might be reset.

• Where will the Web server root reside?

• Does the Web server serve data for another highly available application? If so, resource dependencies might exist between the resources so that one starts or stops before the other. See the r_properties(5) man page for a description of the resource property Resource_dependencies that sets these dependencies.

• Determine the resource groups to use for network addresses and application resources and the dependencies between them. See the rg_properties(5) man page for a description of the resource group property RG_dependencies that sets these dependencies.

• Provide the logical hostname (for failover services) or shared address (for scalable services) for clients to use to access the data service.

• Because you can configure Oracle iPlanet Web Server to bind to INADDR_ANY, if you plan to run multiple instances of the Oracle iPlanet Web Server data service or multiple data services on the same node, each instance must bind to a unique network address and port number.

• Determine the entries for the Confdir_list and Port_list properties. For failover services, both of these properties can have only one entry. For scalable services, they can have multiple entries. The number of entries, however, must be the same and must map to each other in the order specified. See How to Register and Configure HA for Oracle iPlanet Web Server in a Failover Configuration for details.

• Determine if you will utilize the Monitor_Uri_List extension property. This extension property enables you to monitor an arbitrary list of URIs. Monitoring arbitrary URIs is beneficial if you will configure other data services that are accessible over the web. Use of the Monitor_Uri_List extension property is not supported with SSL-based instances of Oracle iPlanet Web Server. If you are upgrading HA for Oracle iPlanet Web Server from a previous version, you must perform the resource type upgrade procedure to use the new property. For instructions, see Upgrading a Resource Type in Oracle Solaris Cluster Data Services Planning and Administration Guide. See Monitoring Arbitrary URIs for detailed information about this option and example usage of Monitor_Uri_List.

• Determine where to place logs and error files on the local file system.

• Determine where to place the contents on the cluster file system.