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.
The following table describes the terms used in this document when describing administrative tasks for Oracle Traffic Director.
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Configuration | A collection of configurable elements (metadata) that determine the run-time behavior of an Oracle Traffic Director instance.
A typical configuration contains definitions for the listeners (IP address and port combinations) on which Oracle Traffic Director should listen for requests and information about the servers in the back end to which the requests should be sent. Oracle Traffic Director reads the configuration when an Oracle Traffic Director instance starts and while processing client requests. |
| Instance | An Oracle Traffic Director server that is instantiated from a configuration and deployed on an administration node. |
| Failover group | Two Oracle Traffic Director instances grouped by a virtual IP address (VIP), to provide high availability in active-passive mode. Requests are received at the VIP and routed to the Oracle Traffic Director instance that is designated as the primary instance. If the primary instance is not reachable, requests are routed to the backup instance.
For active-active failover, two failover groups are required, each with a unique VIP, but both consisting of the same nodes with the primary and backup roles reversed. Each instance in the failover group is designated as the primary instance for one VIP and the backup for the other VIP. |
| Administration server | A specially configured Oracle Traffic Director instance that hosts the administration console and command-line interfaces, using which you can create and manage Oracle Traffic Director configurations, deploy instances on administration nodes, and manage the lifecycle of these instances. Note that you can deploy instances of Oracle Traffic Director configuration on the administration server. In this sense, the administration server can function as an administration node as well. |
| Administration node | A specially configured Oracle Traffic director instance that is registered with the remote administration server. The administration node running on a host acts as the agent of the remote administration server and assists the administration server in managing the instances running on the host.
Note that, on a given node, you can deploy only one instance of a configuration. |
| INSTANCE_HOME | A directory of your choice, on the administration server or an administration node, in which the configuration data and binary files pertaining to Oracle Traffic Director instances are stored. |
| ORACLE_HOME | A directory of your choice in which you install the Oracle Traffic Director binaries. |
| Administration console | A web-based graphical interface on the administration server that you can use to create, deploy, and manage Oracle Traffic Director instances. |
| Client | Any agent—a browser or an application, for example—that sends HTTP, HTTPS and TCP requests to Oracle Traffic Director instances. |
| Origin server | A server in the back end, to which Oracle Traffic Director forwards the HTTP, HTTPS and TCP requests that it receives from clients, and from which it receives responses to client requests.
Origin servers can be application servers like Oracle WebLogic Server managed servers, web servers, and so on. |
| Origin-server pool | A collection of origin servers that host the same application or service that you can load-balance by using Oracle Traffic Director.
Oracle Traffic Director distributes client requests to servers in the origin-server pool based on the load-distribution method that is specified for the pool. Oracle Traffic Director can communicate with the origin servers in the origin-server pool directly, or through a configured HTTP forward proxy server. |
| Virtual server | A virtual entity within an Oracle Traffic Director server instance that provides a unique IP address (or host name) and port combination through which Oracle Traffic Director can serve requests for one or more domains.
An Oracle Traffic Director instance on a node can contain multiple virtual servers. Administrators can configure settings such as the maximum number of incoming connections specifically for each virtual server. They can also customize how each virtual server handles requests. |