About Oracle Business Intelligence Components in a Clustered Environment
The figure below shows the system components and Java components in a highly available Oracle Business Intelligence deployment.
See About the Administration Server, Managed Servers, and System Components for more information about system components and Java components.
In the figure above, the Oracle Business Intelligence Java components are deployed on the BI_SERVER1 and BI_SERVER2 Managed Servers on APPHOST1 and APPHOST2. These Managed Servers are configured in an Oracle WebLogic cluster.
Oracle BI Presentation Services, JavaHost, Oracle BI Cluster Controller, Oracle BI Scheduler, and Oracle BI Presentation Services are system components installed on APPHOST1 and APPHOST2 and configured as a cluster. The Cluster Controller and Oracle BI Scheduler on APPHOST2 are passive (they are started but do not service requests) and are only made active if APPHOST1 components fail.
Customer metadata is stored in the shared SDD (as BAR files for import or export).
Recommendations for Availability
In a production system, it is recommended that you deploy two or more instances of every component on two or more computers, so that each component type has an instance running on more than one computer for fault tolerance.
This configuration provides redundancy for Managed Servers and system components, an essential requirement for high availability and failover. You can see whether the system has any single points of failure by using the Failover tab of the Availability page in Fusion Middleware Control. See Using Fusion Middleware Control to Identify Single Points of Failure for more information.
You can also ensure high availability by configuring redundancy in the database tier (Oracle RAC recommended), web tier, and for the Administration Server. See Configuring High Availability for Oracle Business Intelligence and EPM in High Availability Guidefor more information.
Note also the following requirements:
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All Oracle BI Servers participating in the cluster must be within the same domain and on the same LAN subnet. Geographically separated computers are not supported.
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The clock on each server participating in a cluster must be kept in synchronization. Out-of-sync clocks can skew reporting.
Using Fusion Middleware Control to Identify Single Points of Failure
If there is a single point of failure in a process, you can use Fusion Middleware Control to find it.
Before you begin this procedure, ensure that you are familiar with the information in Using Fusion Middleware Control.
To identify single points of failure:
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Go to the Business Intelligence Overview page, as described in Displaying Oracle Business Intelligence Pages in Fusion Middleware Control.
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Display the Failover tab of the Availability page.
On this page, you can view scaled out system components and whether to configure primary/secondary system components.
Click the Help for this pagehelp menu option to access the page-level help for its elements.
Achieving High Availability Using an Active-Passive Model
As an alternative to setting up the active-active configuration described in the previous sections, you can set up Oracle Business Intelligence in an active-passive configuration using Oracle Fusion Middleware Cold Failover Cluster (Cold Failover Cluster).
In a Cold Failover Cluster configuration, two or more application server instances are configured to serve the same application workload, but only one is active at any particular time.
A two-node Cold Failover Cluster can be used to achieve active-passive availability for Oracle Business Intelligence. In a Cold Failover Cluster, one node is active while the other is passive, on standby. In the event that the active node fails, the standby node is activated, and Oracle Business Intelligence continues servicing clients from that node. All Oracle Business Intelligence components are failed over to the new active node. No Oracle Business Intelligence components run on the failed node after the failover.
See Active-Passive High Availability Solutions in High Availability Guide for detailed information.