1 Getting Started with Oracle Traffic Director

The following are the new features in Oracle Traffic Director 11.1.1.7.0:

• WebSocket protocol

  This version of Oracle Traffic Director supports the WebSocket protocol. This feature enables Oracle Traffic Director to load balance applications built with WebSocket support.

• Content-based routing

  The previous version of Oracle Traffic Director enabled administrators to configure routing rules to route incoming HTTP/S traffic based on either HTTP/S headers or request URI/query information. Oracle Traffic Director now enables administrators to configure rules to route requests based on content in the body of a request.

• Support for LDAP/T3 Load Balancing

  Oracle Traffic Director now supports basic LDAP/T3 load balancing at layer 7, where requests are handled as generic TCP connections for traffic tunneling.

• Web Logic Server keep-alive synchronization

  To improve performance, HTTP keep-alive connections are maintained between Oracle Traffic Director and the origin servers. However, if an origin server closes a connection while Oracle Traffic Director has started sending a request to the server through the connection, it could result in a 503 server error. To prevent this, the connections should always be closed by Oracle Traffic Director, and not by the origin server. Oracle Traffic Director now takes advantage of Web Logic Server-specific HTTP/S headers, whereby Oracle Traffic Director obtains Web Logic Server's keep-alive timeout value and uses it to adjust its own timeout value. This feature is called Keep-Alive Timeout Synchronization.

• Least response time algorithm

  Oracle Traffic Director introduces a new load-balancing method called least response time. This method enables Oracle Traffic Director to generate more load on those origin servers that are responding faster than others.

• Condition builder

  Condition builder enables you to easily build conditions using an interactive GUI. Condition builder is available for use when configuring routes, caching rules, compression rules and request limits.

• Web Application Firewalls

  Oracle Traffic Director now supports web application firewalls. You can create web application firewalls that enable you to apply a set of rules to HTTP requests, for identifying and blocking attacks. For more information, see Managing Web Application Firewalls.

  For information about how web application firewall rules are used for preventing attacks, and for some examples and use cases, see Web Application Firewall Examples and Use Cases.

• Oracle Traffic Director on Solaris 11.1

  Oracle Traffic Director can now be installed on Solaris 11.1 on Exalogic and Oracle SuperCluster.

Oracle Traffic Director provides the following features:

• Advanced methods for load distribution

  You can configure Oracle Traffic Director to distribute client requests to servers in the back end by using one of the following methods:

  • Round robin

  • Least connection count

  • Least response time

  • Weighted round robin

  • Weighted least connection count

• Flexible routing and load control on back-end servers

  • Request-based routing

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to route HTTP/S requests to specific servers in the back end based on information in the request URI: pattern, query string, domain, source and destination IP addresses, and so on.

  • Content-based routing

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to route HTTP/S requests to specific servers in the back end based on contents within a request. This way, web service requests such as XML or JSON can be easily routed to specific origin servers based on specific elements within the body content. Content-based routing is enabled by default.

  • Request rate acceleration

    Administrators can configure the rate at which Oracle Traffic Director increases the load (number of requests) for specific servers in the back end. By using this feature, administrators can allow a server that has just been added to the pool, or has restarted, to perform startup tasks such as loading data and allocating system resources.

  • Connection limiting

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to limit the number of concurrent connections to a server in the back end. When the configured connection limit for a server is reached, further requests that require new connections are not sent to that server.

• Controlling the request load and quality of service

  • Request rate limiting

    Oracle Traffic Director can be set up to limit the rate of incoming requests from specific clients and for specific types of requests. This feature enables administrators to optimize the utilization of the available bandwidth, guarantee a certain level of quality of service, and prevent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

  • Quality of service tuning

    To ensure equitable utilization of the available network resources for incoming requests, you can configure Oracle Traffic Director virtual servers to limit the maximum number of concurrent connections to clients and the maximum speed at which data can be transferred to clients.

• Support for WebSocket connections

  Oracle Traffic Director handles WebSocket connections by default. WebSocket connections are long-lived and allow support for live content, games in real-time, video chatting, and so on. In addition, Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to ensure that only those clients that strictly adhere to R FC 6455 are allowed. For more information, see the section Configuring Routes and the Oracle Traffic Director Command-Line Reference.

• Integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware

  • Oracle Traffic Director is designed to recognize and handle headers that are part of requests to, and responses from, Oracle WebLogic Server managed servers in the back end.

  • When an Oracle Traffic Director instance is configured to distribute client requests to clustered Oracle WebLogic Server managed servers, Oracle Traffic Director automatically detects changes in the cluster—such as the removal or addition of managed servers, and considers such changes while routing requests.

  • Patches that Oracle delivers for the Oracle Traffic Director software can be applied by using OPatch, a Java-based utility, which is the standard method for applying patches to Oracle Fusion Middleware products.

• Easy-to-use administration interfaces

  Administrators can use either a graphical user interface or a command-line interface to administer Oracle Traffic Director instances.

  Administrators can also use Fusion Middleware Control, a browser-based graphical user interface, to monitor statistics and perform lifecycle tasks for Oracle Traffic Director instances.

• Security

  Oracle Traffic Director enables and enhances security for your IT infrastructure in the following ways:

  • Reverse proxy

    By serving as an intermediary between clients outside the network and servers in the back end, Oracle Traffic Director masks the names of servers in the back end and provides a single point at which you can track access to critical data and applications hosted by multiple servers in the back end.

  • Intrusion detection

    You can prevent malicious traffic from passing through Oracle Traffic Director to the origin servers and clients by configuring Oracle Traffic Director to filter data received from clients and origin servers based on specified rules.

  • Support for SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0

    To secure data during transmission and to ensure that only authorized users access the servers in the back end, you can configure SSL/TLS-enabled HTTP and TCP listeners for Oracle Traffic Director instances.

    You can either use digital certificates issued by commercial CAs such as VeriSign or generate RSA- and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-type self-signed certificates with key sizes of up to 4096 bits by using the administration console or the CLI.

  • Web Application Firewalls

    Web application firewalls enable you to apply a set of rules to an HTTP request, which are useful for preventing common attacks such as Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection. The Web Application Firewall module for Oracle Traffic Director supports open source ModSecurity 2.6.

• High availability

  Oracle Traffic Director provides high availability for your enterprise applications and services through the following mechanisms:

  • Health checks for the back end

    If a server in the back end is no longer available or is fully loaded, Oracle Traffic Director detects this situation automatically through periodic health checks and stops sending client requests to that server. When the failed server becomes available again, Oracle Traffic Director detects this automatically and resumes sending requests to the server.

  • Backup servers in the back end

    When setting up server pools for an Oracle Traffic Director instance, you can designate a few servers in the back end as backup servers. Oracle Traffic Director sends requests to the backup servers only when none of the primary servers is available. This feature ensures continued availability even when some servers in the back end fail.

  • Failover for load balancing

    Two Oracle Traffic Director instances can be deployed in an active-passive or active-active configuration. If the primary Oracle Traffic Director instance fails, the backup instance takes over.

  • Dynamic reconfiguration

    Most configuration changes to Oracle Traffic Director instances can be deployed dynamically, without restarting the instances and without affecting requests that are being processed.

• Monitoring statistics

  Administrators can monitor a wide range of statistics pertaining to the performance of Oracle Traffic Director instances through several methods: the administration console, the command-line interface, and a report in XML format.

• High performance

  • SSL/TLS offloading

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured as the SSL/TLS termination point for HTTP/S and TCP requests. This reduces the processing of overhead on the servers in the back end.

  • Content caching

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to cache (in its process memory) content that it receives from origin servers. By caching content, Oracle Traffic Director helps reduce the load on servers in the back end and helps improve performance for clients.

  • HTTP compression

    Administrators can configure Oracle Traffic Director instances to compress the data received from servers in the back end and forward the compressed content to the requesting clients. This feature improves the response time for clients connected on slow connections.

• Virtualization-enabled solution

  Oracle Traffic Director can be deployed as a virtual appliance on cloud and virtual platforms.

  After deploying Oracle Traffic Director as a physical application, you can create a virtual appliance from an Oracle Traffic Director instance or create an assembly containing multiple such appliances. You can then deploy the appliance or assembly on the Oracle Virtual Machine hypervisor. To enable such a deployment, Oracle provides an Oracle Traffic Director plug-in as part of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, a tool that you can use to build virtual appliances and assemblies from physical applications.

  For more information about creating and deploying virtual assemblies containing Oracle Traffic Director instances, see the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder User's Guide.

• TCP load balancing

  With TCP load balancing, Oracle Traffic Director accepts client connections and routes the requests to a pool of servers running TCP-based protocols.

In an Oracle Java Cloud Service instance with a load balancer, Oracle Java Cloud Service configures a single Oracle Traffic Director instance running on a dedicated compute node distributing client requests to a pool of servers in the back end.

An Oracle Traffic Director configuration is a collection of elements that define the run-time behavior of an Oracle Traffic Director instance. An Oracle Traffic Director configuration contains information about various elements of an Oracle Traffic Director instance such as listeners, origin servers, failover groups, and logs.

For more information about the features of Oracle Traffic Director, see the Oracle Traffic Director Administrator's Guide.

The following table describes the terms used in this document when describing administrative tasks for Oracle Traffic Director.

Oracle Traffic Director can be used either as a physical application or as a virtual appliance.

• Physical application

  You can install Oracle Traffic Director on an Oracle Linux 5.6 system and run one or more instances of the product to distribute client requests to servers in the back end.

  For information about installing Oracle Traffic Director as a physical application, see the Oracle Traffic Director Installation Guide.

• Appliance running on a virtual platform

  After deploying Oracle Traffic Director as a physical application, you can create a virtual appliance from an Oracle Traffic Director instance or create an assembly containing multiple such appliances. You can then deploy the appliance or assembly on the Oracle Virtual Machine hypervisor. To enable such a deployment, Oracle provides an Oracle Traffic Director plug-in as part of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, a tool that you can use to build virtual appliances and assemblies from physical applications.

  For more information about creating and deploying virtual assemblies containing Oracle Traffic Director instances, see the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder User's Guide.

You can perform various administrative tasks—enabling a feature of Oracle Traffic Director, adjusting how the feature works, and instructing Oracle Traffic Director to handle requests and responses in specific ways—by using the administration interfaces provided by the administration server.

The following subsections describe the administration framework in detail:

• Overview of the Administration Framework

• Administration Server

• Administration Node

• Administration Interfaces

• Configuration Store

• Instance Configuration Files

Figure 1-2 shows the typical order of tasks that you should perform to create and manage Oracle Traffic Director instances.

Figure 1-2 Oracle Traffic Director Administration Workflow

Description of "Figure 1-2 Oracle Traffic Director Administration Workflow"

• Install the product

  You can install Oracle Traffic Director on Oracle Linux 5.6+ on an x86_64 system, by using an interactive graphical wizard or in silent mode.

  For more information, see the Oracle Traffic Director Installation Guide.

• Create the administration server

  After installing the product, you should create an administration server instance of Oracle Traffic Director. The administration server is a specially configured Oracle Traffic Director virtual server that you can use to administer Oracle Traffic Director instances.

  For more information, see "Creating the Administration Server Instance" in the Oracle Traffic Director Installation Guide.

• Manage the administration server

  At times, you might want to stop the administration server and restart it, or change settings such as the administrator user name and password.

  For more information, see Managing the Administration Server.

• Access the administration console and command-line interface

  You can use the administration console and command-line interface of Oracle Traffic Director to create, modify, and monitor Oracle Traffic Director instances.

  For information about accessing the administration console and command-line interface, see Accessing the Administration Interfaces.

• Create and manage administration nodes

  Administration nodes are physical hosts on which you can create Oracle Traffic Director instances.

  For information about managing administration nodes, see Managing Administration Nodes.

• Create and manage configurations

  After creating the administration nodes, create configurations that define your Oracle Traffic Director instances. A configuration is a collection of metadata that you can use to instantiate Oracle Traffic Director. Oracle Traffic Director reads the configuration when a server instance starts and while processing client requests.

  For information about managing configurations, see Managing Configurations.

• Create and manage instances

  After creating a configuration, you can create Oracle Traffic Director server instances by deploying the configuration on one or more hosts. You can view the current state of each instance, start or stop it, reconfigure it to reflect configuration changes, and so on.

  For information about managing instances, see Managing Instances.

• Define and manage origin-server pools

  For an Oracle Traffic Director instance to distribute client requests, you should define one or more origin-server pools or in the back end. For each origin-server pool, you can define the load-distribution method that Oracle Traffic Director should use to distribute requests. In addition, for each origin server in a pool, you can define how Oracle Traffic Director should control the request load.

  For more information, see Managing Origin-Server Pools and Managing Origin Servers.

• Create and manage virtual servers and listeners

  An Oracle Traffic Director instance running on a node contains one or more virtual servers. Each virtual server provides one or more listeners for receiving requests from clients. For each virtual server, you can configure parameters such as the origin-server pool to which the virtual server should route requests, the quality of service settings, request limits, caching rules, and log preferences.

  For more information, see Managing Virtual Servers and Managing Listeners.

• Manage security

  Oracle Traffic Director, by virtue of its external-facing position in a typical network, plays a critical role in protecting data and applications in the back end against attacks and unauthorized access from outside the network. In addition, the security and integrity of data traversing through Oracle Traffic Director to the rest of the network needs to be guaranteed.

  For more information, see Managing Security.

• Manage Logs

  Oracle Traffic Director records data about server events such as configuration changes, instances being started and stopped, errors while processing requests, and so on in log files. You can use the logs to troubleshoot errors and to tune the system for improved performance.

  For more information, see Managing Logs.

• Monitor statistics

  The state and performance of Oracle Traffic Director instances are influenced by several factors: configuration settings, volume of incoming requests, health of origin servers, nature of data passing through the instances, and so on. As the administrator, you can view metrics for all of these factors through the command-line interface and administration console, and extract the statistics in the form of XML files for detailed analysis. You can also adjust the granularity at which Oracle Traffic Director collects statistics.

  For more information, see Monitoring Oracle Traffic Director Instances.

• Tune for performance

  Based on your analysis of performance statistics and to respond to changes in the request load profile, you might want to adjust the request processing parameters of Oracle Traffic Director to maintain or improve the performance. Oracle Traffic Director provides a range of performance-tuning controls and knobs that you can use to limit the size and volume of individual requests, control timeout settings, configure thread pool settings, SSL/TLS caching behavior, and so on.

  For more information, see Tuning Oracle Traffic Director for Performance.

• Diagnose and troubleshoot problems

  Despite the best possible precautions, you might occasionally run into problems when installing, configuring, and monitoring Oracle Traffic Director instances. You can diagnose and solve some of these problems based on the information available in error messages and logs. For complex problems, you would need to gather certain data that Oracle support personnel can use to understand, reproduce, and diagnose the problem.

  For more information, see Diagnosing and Troubleshooting Problems.

This section describes how you can set up a load-balanced service using Oracle Traffic Director with the minimum necessary configuration. The purpose of this section is to reinforce and illustrate the concepts discussed earlier in this chapter and to prepare you for the configuration tasks described in the remaining chapters.

This section contains the following topics:

• Example Topology

• Creating the Load Balancer for the Example Topology

• Verifying the Load-Balancing Behavior of the Oracle Traffic Director Instance