6 Preparing the Load Balancer and Firewalls for an Enterprise Deployment

It is important to understand how to configure the hardware load balancer and ports that must be opened on the firewalls for an enterprise deployment.

6.1 Configuring Virtual Hosts on the Hardware Load Balancer

The hardware load balancer configuration facilitates to recognize and route requests to several virtual servers and associated ports for different types of network traffic and monitoring.

The following topics explain how to configure the hardware load balancer, provide the summary of the virtual servers required, and provide additional instructions for these virtual servers:

6.1.1 Overview of the Hardware Load Balancer Configuration

As shown in the topology diagrams, you must configure the hardware load balancer to recognize and route requests to several virtual servers and associated ports for different types of network traffic and monitoring.

In the context of a load-balancing device, a virtual server is a construct that allows multiple physical servers to appear as one for load-balancing purposes. It is typically represented by an IP address and a service, and it is used to distribute incoming client requests to the servers in the server pool.

The virtual servers should be configured to direct traffic to the appropriate host computers and ports for the various services available in the enterprise deployment.

In addition, you should configure the load balancer to monitor the host computers and ports for availability so that the traffic to a particular server is stopped as soon as possible when a service is down. This ensures that incoming traffic on a given virtual host is not directed to an unavailable service in the other tiers.

Note that after you configure the load balancer, you can later configure the Web server instances in the Web tier to recognize a set of virtual hosts that use the same names as the virtual servers you defined for the load balancer. For each request coming from the hardware load balancer, the Web server can then route the request appropriately, based on the server name included in the header in the request. For more information, see Configuring Oracle HTTP Server for Administration and Oracle Web Services Manager.

6.1.2 Typical Procedure for Configuring the Hardware Load Balancer

The following procedure outlines the typical steps for configuring a hardware load balancer for an enterprise deployment.

Note that the actual procedures for configuring a specific load balancer will differ, depending on the specific type of load balancer. There may also be some differences depending on the type of protocol that is being load balanced. For example, TCP virtual servers and HTTP virtual servers use different types of monitors for their pools. Refer to the vendor-supplied documentation for actual steps.

  1. Create a pool of servers. This pool contains a list of servers and the ports that are included in the load-balancing definition.

    For example, for load balancing between the Web hosts, create a pool of servers that would direct requests to hosts WEBHOST1 and WEBHOST2 on port 7777.

  2. Create rules to determine whether or not a given host and service is available and assign it to the pool of servers described in Step 1.

  3. Create the required virtual servers on the load balancer for the addresses and ports that receive requests for the applications.

    For a complete list of the virtual servers required for the enterprise deployment, see Summary of the Virtual Servers Required for an Enterprise Deployment.

    When you define each virtual server on the load balancer, consider the following:

    1. If your load balancer supports it, specify whether or not the virtual server is available internally, externally or both. Ensure that internal addresses are only resolvable from inside the network.

    2. Configure SSL Termination, if applicable, for the virtual server.

    3. Assign the pool of servers created in Step 1 to the virtual server.

6.1.3 Summary of the Virtual Servers Required for an Enterprise Deployment

This topic provides the details of the virtual servers required for an enterprise deployment.

The following table provides a list of the virtual servers you must define on the hardware load balancer for the Oracle WebCenter Portal enterprise topology:

Virtual Host Server Pool Protocol SSL Termination? External?

admin.example.com:80

WEBHOST1.example.com:7777 WEBHOST2.example.com:7777

HTTP

No

No

wcp.example.com:443

WEBHOST1.example.com:7777 WEBHOST2.example.com:7777

HTTPS

Yes

Yes

wcpinternal.example.com:80

WEBHOST1.example.com:7777 WEBHOST2.example.com:7777

HTTP

No

No

wcpinternal.example.com:6300

WCCHOST1.example.com:4444 WCCHOST2.example.com:4444

TCP

No

No

6.1.4 Additional Instructions for admin.example.com

This section provides the additional instructions required for the virtual server—admin.example.com.

When you configure this virtual server on the hardware load balancer:

  • Enable address and port translation.

  • Enable reset of connections when services or hosts are down.

6.1.5 Additional Instructions for wcp.example.com

This section provides additional instructions for configuring the virtual server—wcp.example.com.

When you configure this virtual server on the hardware load balancer:

  • Use port 80 and port 443. Any request that goes to port 80 (non-ssl protocol) should be redirected to port 443 (ssl protocol).

  • Specify HTTP as the protocol.

  • Enable address and port translation.

  • Enable reset of connections when services and/or nodes are down.

  • Create rules to filter out access to /console and /em on this virtual server.

    These context strings direct requests to the Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console and to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control and should be used only when accessing the system from admin.example.com.

6.1.6 Additional Instructions for wcpinternal.example.com

This section provides additional instructions for configuring the virtual server—wcpinternal.example.com.

This virtual server is used for internal invocations of WebCenter Portal and WebCenter Content services. This URL is not exposed to the Internet and is accessible only from the intranet. The incoming traffic from clients is not SSL enabled. Two virtual servers are configured at the hardware load balancer using this address with different ports.

This address is used for both HTTP and Remote Intradoc Client (RIDC) traffic:

  • HTTP connections are received at the hardware load balancer on port 80 and forwarded to the WEBHOST servers on the OHS default port 7777.

  • RIDC TCP connections are received at the hardware load balancer on port 6300 and forwarded to the WCCHOST servers on the RIDC default port 4444.

Note:

It is recommended to use a unique port for the front-end configuration versus simply receiving and forwarding on the RIDC service port number (for example, 4444).

Two server pools are configured at the hardware load balancer to support this topology: 

  1. Web servers; containing: WEBHOST1:7777 and WEBHOST2:7777

  2. RIDC servers; containing: WCCHOST1:4444 and WCCHOST2:4444

The RIDC traffic uses port 6300 on the load balancer (6300 is mainly for masking), but the traffic ultimately routes to the RIDC port (4444) on the WebCenter hosts.

When you configure this virtual server on the hardware load balancer:

  • Enable address and port translation.

  • Enable reset of connections when services or nodes are down.

  • As with the wcp.example.com, create rules to filter out access to /console and /em on this virtual server.

6.2 Configuring the Firewalls and Ports for an Enterprise Deployment

As an administrator, it is important that you become familiar with the port numbers used by various Oracle Fusion Middleware products and services. This ensures that the same port number is not used by two services on the same host, and that the proper ports are open on the firewalls in the enterprise topology.

The following tables lists the ports that you must open on the firewalls in the topology:

Firewall notation:

  • FW1 refers to the outermost firewall.

  • FW2 refers to the firewall between the web tier and the application tier.

  • FW3 refers to the firewall between the application tier and the data tier.

Table 6-1 Firewall Ports Common to All Fusion Middleware Enterprise Deployments

Type Firewall Port and Port Range Protocol / Application Inbound / Outbound Other Considerations and Timeout Guidelines

Browser request

FW0

80

HTTP / Load Balancer

Inbound

Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.

Browser request

FW0

443

HTTPS / Load Balancer

Inbound

Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.

Browser request

FW1

80

HTTPS / Load Balancer

Outbound (for intranet clients)

Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.

Browser request

FW1

443

HTTPS / Load Balancer

Outbound (for intranet clients)

Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.

Callbacks and Outbound invocations

FW1

80

HTTPS / Load Balancer

Outbound

Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.

Callbacks and Outbound invocations

FW1

443

HTTPS / Load Balancer

Outbound

Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.

Load balancer to Oracle HTTP Server

n/a

7777

HTTP

n/a

n/a

OHS registration with Administration Server

FW1

7001

HTTP/t3

Inbound

Set the timeout to a short period (5-10 seconds).

OHS management by Administration Server

FW1

OHS Admin Port (7779)

TCP and HTTP, respectively

Outbound

Set the timeout to a short period (5-10 seconds).

Session replication within a WebLogic Server cluster

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

By default, this communication uses the same port as the server's listen address.

Administration Console access

FW1

7001

HTTP / Administration Server and Enterprise Manager

t3

Both

You should tune this timeout based on the type of access to the admin console (whether it is planned to use the Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console from application tier clients or clients external to the application tier).

Database access

FW2

1521

SQL*Net

Both

Timeout depends on database content and on the type of process model used for SOA.

Coherence for deployment

n/a

8088

Range: 8000 - 8090

 

n/a

n/a

Oracle Unified Directory access

FW2

389

636 (SSL)

LDAP or LDAP/ssl

Inbound

You should tune the directory server's parameters based on load balancer, and not the other way around.

Oracle Notification Server (ONS)

FW2

6200

ONS

Both

Required for Gridlink. An ONS server runs on each database server.

Type Firewall Port and Port Range Protocol / Application Inbound / Outbound Other Considerations and Timeout Guidelines

WSM-PM access

FW1

7010

Range: 7010 - 7999

HTTP / WLS_WSM-PMn

Inbound

Set the timeout to 60 seconds.

Portal Server access

FW1

9001

HTTP / WLS_Portaln

Inbound

Set the timeout to a short period (5–10 seconds).

Portlet Server Access

FW1

9002

HTTP / WLS_Portletn

Inbound

Set the timeout to a short period (5-10 seconds).

Collaboration Server Access

FW1

9003

HTTP / WLS_Collabn

Inbound

Set the timeout to a short period (5-10 seconds).

RIDC API requests

FW1

6300

TCP/WLS_WCCn

Inbound

n/a