A Typical Portal Server Installation

Figure 4–2 illustrates some of the components of a portal deployment but does not address the actual physical network design, single points of failure, nor high availability.

This illustration shows the high-level architecture of a typical installation at a company site for a business-to-employee portal. In this figure, the Gateway is hosted in the company’s demilitarized zone (DMZ) along with other systems accessible from the Internet, including proxy/cache servers, web servers, and mail Gateways. The portal node, portal search node, and directory server, are hosted on the internal network where users have access to systems and services ranging from individual employee desktop systems to legacy systems.

If you are designing an ISP hosting deploymentthat hosts separate Portal Server instances for business customers who each want their own portal, contact your Sun representative. Portal Server requires customizations to provide ISP hosting functionality.

Figure 4–2 shows users on the Internet accessing the Gateway from a browser. The Gateway connects the user to the IP address and port for portal users attempting to access. For example, a B2B portal would usually allow access to only port 443, the HTTPS port. Depending on the authorized use, the Gateway forwards requests to the portal node, or directly to the service on the enterprise internal network.

Figure 4–2 High-level Architecture for a Business-to-Employee Portal

Figure 4–3 shows a Portal Server deployment with Secure Remote Access services.

Figure 4–3 Secure Remote Access Deployment