2 Planning Your ECE Installation
Learn how to plan your Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) installation.
Topics in this document:
About Planning Your 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.
System Deployment Planning
When planning an ECE installation, you consider how many charging server nodes to include in your cluster. For any gateway servers that you use as your network integration for online charging, you also determine how many gateway notes that you need.
When considering how many charging server and 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 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 development or test environment, note the following guidelines:
-
Although you can use one charging server node in a development 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 gateway nodes is 2 to allow for failover.
-
-
Server redundancy is a minimum requirement of ECE installations.
Coherence Planning
ECE nodes are based on Oracle Coherence. Decide how to configure Oracle Coherence settings for your ECE topology. For example, determine 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.
About Installing a Secure System
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. If you have not enabled SSL communication between ECE and BRM during installation, you can enable it after the installation.