This chapter provides information about planning your Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) installation.
When planning an ECE installation, you consider how many physical servers can handle your subscriber base and how many charging server nodes to include in your cluster. You decide what server to use as the primary administrator machine, referred to as the driver machine, and what ECE components to install on the other servers, referred to as server machines. You also consider security aspects of your system and how it communicates with other applications in your charging system, such as Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) and Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller.
There are two types of ECE installations: a standalone installation, which you use to get familiar with ECE, and an integrated installation, which you use for test or production systems.
An ECE standalone system consists only of the basic ECE components that enable you to process simulated usage from sample data provided with ECE. You use the sample data provided in the installation to verify that ECE can process requests when working with other applications such as Pricing Design Center (PDC) and BRM without having to connect to those applications.
For a standalone system, you typically install ECE on one machine. In this case, the ECE driver machine and the ECE server machine are the same machine.
To install a standalone system, you select the ECE Server component when you run the ECE installer.
The difference between an ECE test system and an ECE production system is only the number of machines in the system. You install the same components in a test system that you install in a production system.
For an ECE integrated installation, you set up the ECE system on the driver machine and then later synchronize the setup to all other server machines in your cluster.
When you install an ECE integrated test or production system, you can select to install all ECE software components at once or install ECE software components individually.
A test system could focus on only one integration point at one time; for example, focus on the PDC integration point or the BRM integration point. In those cases, a test system could use the simulator rather than network mediation software during testing.
However, to test a production system, you must install network mediation software. The network mediation program must have a connection to ECE to send usage requests for processing. The network mediation program uses the Elastic Charging Client, included with the ECE SDK, to connect to ECE and build and send requests.
For online charging, you can use Diameter Gateway as your network integration. Diameter Gateway is installed as part of the ECE Server installation. Diameter Gateway uses Elastic Charging Client (which is integrated with it) to connect to ECE and build and send requests.
The ECE installer copies sample data files to your installation for use with the standalone installation.
See the discussion of system architecture in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Concepts for information about ECE components.
See "ECE System Requirements" for information about required hardware and software.
When planning an ECE installation, you consider how many charging server nodes to include in your cluster. If you use Diameter Gateway as your network integration for online charging, you also consider how many Diameter Gateway nodes to include in your cluster.
When considering how many charging server nodes and Diameter Gateway nodes to include in your cluster, note the following points:
You will want to determine the minimum number of charging server nodes needed for your customer base. If the minimum number is N, you need to run at least n+ 1 nodes to have uninterrupted usage processing during a rolling upgrade.
In an ECE distributed environment (multiple machines), the guideline is to have a minimum of two charging server nodes per machine (provided the total number of charging server nodes can handle the normal expected throughput for your system). The minimum configuration for Diameter Gateway nodes is 2 to allow for failover plus additional nodes as needed to handle the expected throughput of the system.
For a standalone installation (single machine) for a design or test environment, note the following guidelines:
Although you can use one charging server node in a design or test environment, having only one charging server node is not a valid configuration for deploying into a runtime environment.
The minimum configuration for an ECE standalone installation is 3 charging server nodes, which accounts for two charging server nodes plus an additional node if both charging server nodes fail. The minimum configuration for an ECE standalone installation for Diameter Gateway nodes is 2 to allow for failover.
Server redundancy is a minimum requirement of ECE installations.
ECE nodes are based on Oracle Coherence. Decide how to configure Oracle Coherence settings for your ECE topology. For example, how many nodes to add to the cluster when a node failure occurs. See the discussion in the Oracle Coherence documentation for information about Oracle Coherence high availability and performance concepts.
After you install Oracle NoSQL Database, you can start the Oracle NoSQL data store with either a single-node or multiple-node configuration. A single-node data store configuration (KVLite) is included with the Oracle NoSQL Database installation and can be started in a non-production ECE environment. A multiple-node Oracle NoSQL data store configuration is required for running ECE in a production environment and requires additional configuration to make multiple nodes work as an Oracle NoSQL cluster.
See the discussion in the Oracle NoSQL Database documentation for information about setting up an Oracle NoSQL data store and about setting up high availability and performance for the Oracle NoSQL Database.
In a production system, you must ensure that communication between components and access to the system servers are secure. When you install ECE, you will be prompted to select security options during the installer process. After you install ECE, you can enable SSL communication between ECE and BRM. For information about choices for installing a secure system, see BRM Elastic Charging Engine Security Guide. For information about setting up security in ECE after installation, see BRM Elastic Charging Engine System Administrator's Guide.