Planning the Siebel Application Interface Topology

This task is part of Requirements for Installing and Configuring the Siebel Application Interface.

Before you install the Siebel Application Interface for your Siebel deployment, as described in Siebel CRM Download and Installation, you must decide how you will distribute instances of Siebel Application Interface and other Siebel CRM modules. For the best performance and scalability, install the Siebel Application Interface onto one or more dedicated computers.

Two basic methods are as follows:

Single-node. Siebel Application Interface is installed with Siebel Enterprise Components. You might choose to install Siebel Enterprise Components once and configure and use Siebel Application Interface on a single computer node, or operating system instance. Install Siebel Application Interface in the secured application intranet zone, in a different location on the same computer as the other Siebel CRM modules, or on a different computer.
You can use existing Web servers to host reverse proxy or authentication, where these products support jsessionid cookies and the mod_jk module. All instances of Siebel Application Interface must be protected by a reverse proxy.
Distributed. Distributing Siebel CRM modules, where instances of Siebel Application Interface on one or more dedicated computers or operating system instances connect to multiple Siebel Servers in the Siebel Enterprise. These Siebel Application Interface instances can be dynamically balanced for Application Object Manager components on different Siebel Server computers.
You can distribute incoming network traffic over multiple Siebel Application Interface instances by using third-party HTTP load balancers that support jsession-based load balancing in front of a reverse proxy Web server. You can use existing Web servers to host reverse proxy, authentication, or load balancing, where these products support jsessionid cookies and the mod_jk module. All instances of Siebel Application Interface must be protected by a reverse proxy.
Note: Application containers for Siebel Application Interface instances on multiple nodes can be load balanced using products such as Apache HTTP Server (httpd) with the mod_jk module. The products you use must provide reverse proxy services and support load balancing based on jsessionid cookies. All instances of Siebel Application Interface must be protected by a reverse proxy. For more information about these or other products that meet these requirements, refer to vendor documentation. If you configure load balancing for application containers in this way, then, whenever an application container fails for a Siebel Application Interface node, the active sessions handled by that node transparently failover to another available healthy application container node. For more information, see Load Balancing Siebel Application Interface by Configuring the workers.properties File.

Each deployment choice involves a trade-off. However, in enterprise-sized deployments, it is strongly recommended that you use a distributed node deployment for the following reasons:

Less resource contention. Distributing the Siebel Application Interfaces and the Siebel Servers (with Application Object Manager components) on different computers eliminates contention for CPU and other server resources. However, to take advantage of the performance improvement, you must have a high-speed network connection between the two computers.
Higher fault tolerance. Operating multiple instances of components on multiple computers reduces downtime and the effect of failure on any one computer.
High availability. A multinode configuration is required for deployments that support large numbers of concurrent users or where high availability is an operating requirement.

Note: Configuring a maintenance window page in Siebel CRM can be performed in multiple ways:

If a reverse proxy is used, the reverse proxy can be set to use error documents. An example for Apache HTTP follows: ErrorDocument 503 /maintenance-message.html
URL rewrite capability of the web server can also be used for this.

Related Books

Siebel Deployment Planning Guide

Siebel Security Guide

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