Not Supported: Access Manager Internal Configuration for Multiple Directory Server Instances

Access Manager supports, by way of post-installation configuration, multiple LDAP directories for each Access Manger service. In this way, Access Manager can detect failure of a primary Directory Server instance and fail over to an standby instance. This built-in mechanism has several drawbacks:

• Configuration of these multiple Directory Server instances needs to be done for each of the Access Manger services: user profiles, policies, LDAP authentication, Membership authentication, and so forth.

• Access Manager does not load balance directory requests: only the primary DS instance is used, while the other(s) are inactive.

• Upon a failure of a primary instance, Access Manager switches over to the standby instance, but if the primary instance comes back online, there is no mechanism to revert back to the original configuration.

By contrast, the modular architecture of Fig 2-2 has the following advantages:

• The only required Access Manager configuration is the load balancer's virtual service address, specified at installation time.

• The directory services load balancer In the reference configuration routes requests to all Directory Server instances, monitors the health of these instances, automatically performs the failover and restoration of a failed instance.

• The modular architecture allows you to configure, manage, scale and monitor the Directory Server instances independent of the Access Manager instances.

In the multimaster replication approach of Figure 2-2, write operations are synchromized between directory instances. In environments with many write operations, the overhead of the multimaster replication process can slow down Directory Server processing of client requests. In these situations, the best approach is to direct all write operations to a single master by placing a Directory Proxy Server instance in front of each Directory Server instance. Such situations are not common in portal service deployments, so the reference configuration does not include Directory Proxy Server.