6 Preparing the Load Balancer and Firewalls for an Enterprise Deployment

It is important to understand how to configure the hardware load balancer and ports that must be opened on the firewalls for an enterprise deployment.

• Configuring Virtual Hosts on the Hardware Load Balancer
  The hardware load balancer configuration facilitates to recognize and route requests to several virtual servers and associated ports for different types of network traffic and monitoring.
• Configuring the Firewalls and Ports for an Enterprise Deployment
  As an administrator, it is important that you become familiar with the port numbers that are used by various Oracle Fusion Middleware products and services. This ensures that the same port number is not used by two services on the same host, and that the proper ports are open on the firewalls in the enterprise topology.

6.1 Configuring Virtual Hosts on the Hardware Load Balancer

The hardware load balancer configuration facilitates to recognize and route requests to several virtual servers and associated ports for different types of network traffic and monitoring.

The following topics explain how to configure the hardware load balancer, provide a summary of the virtual servers that are required, and provide additional instructions for these virtual servers:

• Overview of the Hardware Load Balancer Configuration
  
• Typical Procedure for Configuring the Hardware Load Balancer
  
• Summary of the Virtual Servers Required for an Enterprise Deployment
  
• Additional Instructions for admin.example.com
  

6.1.1 Overview of the Hardware Load Balancer Configuration

As shown in the topology diagrams, you must configure the hardware load balancer to recognize and route requests to several virtual servers and associated ports for different types of network traffic and monitoring.

In the context of a load-balancing device, a virtual server is a construct that allows multiple physical servers to appear as one for load-balancing purposes. It is typically represented by an IP address and a service, and it is used to distribute incoming client requests to the servers in the server pool.

The virtual servers should be configured to direct traffic to the appropriate host computers and ports for the various services that are available in the enterprise deployment.

In addition, you should configure the load balancer to monitor the host computers and ports for availability so that the traffic to a particular server is stopped as soon as possible when a service is down. This ensures that incoming traffic on a given virtual host is not directed to an unavailable service in the other tiers.

Note that after you configure the load balancer, you can later configure the web server instances in the web tier to recognize a set of virtual hosts that use the same names as the virtual servers that you defined for the load balancer. For each request coming from the hardware load balancer, the web server can then route the request appropriately, based on the server name included in the header of the request. See Configuring Oracle HTTP Server for Administration and Oracle Web Services Manager.

6.1.2 Typical Procedure for Configuring the Hardware Load Balancer

The following procedure outlines the typical steps for configuring a hardware load balancer for an enterprise deployment.

Note that the actual procedures for configuring a specific load balancer will differ, depending on the specific type of load balancer. There may also be some differences depending on the type of protocol that is being load balanced. For example, TCP virtual servers and HTTP virtual servers use different types of monitors for their pools. Refer to the vendor-supplied documentation for actual steps.

1. Create a pool of servers. This pool contains a list of servers and the ports that are included in the load-balancing definition.

   For example, for load balancing between the web hosts, create a pool of servers that would direct requests to hosts WEBHOST1 and WEBHOST2 on port 7777.

2. Create rules to determine whether a given host and service is available and assign it to the pool of servers that are described in Step 1.

3. Create the required virtual servers on the load balancer for the addresses and ports that receive requests for the applications.

   For a complete list of the virtual servers required for the enterprise deployment, see Summary of the Virtual Servers Required for an Enterprise Deployment.

   When you define each virtual server on the load balancer, consider the following:

   1. If your load balancer supports it, specify whether the virtual server is available internally, externally, or both. Ensure that internal addresses are only resolvable from inside the network.

   2. Configure SSL Termination, if applicable, for the virtual server.

   3. Assign the pool of servers created in Step 1 to the virtual server.

6.1.3 Summary of the Virtual Servers Required for an Enterprise Deployment

This topic provides details of the virtual servers that are required for an enterprise deployment.

The following table provides a list of the virtual servers that you must define on the hardware load balancer for the Oracle Business Intelligence enterprise topology:

Table 6-1 Virtual Servers Required for an Enterprise Deployment

Virtual Host	Server Pool	Protocol	SSL Termination?	External?
admin.example.com:80	WEBHOST1.example.com:7777 WEBHOST2.example.com:7777	HTTP	No	No
bi.example.com:443	WEBHOST1.example.com:7777 WEBHOST2.example.com:7777	HTTPS	Yes	Yes
biinternal.example.com:80	WEBHOST1.example.com:7777 WEBHOST2.example.com:7777	HTTP	No	No

6.1.4 Additional Instructions for admin.example.com

This section provides additional instructions that are required for the virtual server-admin.example.com.

When you configure this virtual server on the hardware load balancer:

• Enable address and port translation.

• Enable reset of connections when services or hosts are down.

6.2 Configuring the Firewalls and Ports for an Enterprise Deployment

As an administrator, it is important that you become familiar with the port numbers that are used by various Oracle Fusion Middleware products and services. This ensures that the same port number is not used by two services on the same host, and that the proper ports are open on the firewalls in the enterprise topology.

The following tables lists the ports that you must open on the firewalls in the topology:

Firewall notation:

• FW0 refers to the outermost firewall.

• FW1 refers to the firewall between the web tier and the application tier.

• FW2 refers to the firewall between the application tier and the data tier.

Table 6-2 Firewall Ports Common to All Fusion Middleware Enterprise Deployments

Type	Firewall	Port and Port Range	Protocol / Application	Inbound / Outbound	Other Considerations and Timeout Guidelines
Browser request	FW0	80	HTTP / Load Balancer	Inbound	Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.
Browser request	FW0	443	HTTPS / Load Balancer	Inbound	Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.
Browser request	FW1	80	HTTP / Load Balancer	Outbound (for intranet clients)	Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.
Browser request	FW1	443	HTTPS / Load Balancer	Outbound (for intranet clients)	Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.
Callbacks and Outbound invocations	FW1	80	HTTP / Load Balancer	Outbound	Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.
Callbacks and Outbound invocations	FW1	443	HTTPS / Load Balancer	Outbound	Timeout depends on the size and type of HTML content.
Load balancer to Oracle HTTP Server	n/a	7777	HTTP	n/a	n/a
OHS registration with Administration Server	FW1	7001	HTTP / t3	Inbound	Set the timeout to a short period (5-10 seconds).
OHS management by Administration Server	FW1	OHS Admin Port (7779)	TCP / HTTP	Outbound	Set the timeout to a short period (5-10 seconds).
Session replication within a WebLogic Server cluster	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	By default, this communication uses the same port as the server's listen address.
Administration Console access	FW1	7001	HTTP / Administration Server and Enterprise Manager t3	Both	You should tune this timeout based on the type of access to the admin console (whether you plan to use the Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console from the application tier clients or clients external to the application tier).
Database access	FW2	1521	SQL*Net	Both	Timeout depends on database content and on the type of process model used for SOA.
Coherence for deployment	n/a	9991	n/a	n/a	n/a
Oracle Unified Directory access	FW2	389 636 (SSL)	LDAP or LDAP/ssl	Inbound	You should tune the directory server's parameters based on load balancer, and not the other way around.
Oracle Notification Server (ONS)	FW2	6200	ONS	Both	Required for Gridlink. An ONS server runs on each database server.

Table 6-3 Firewall Ports for Product-specific Components in Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Deployments

Type	Firewall	Port and Port Range	Protocol / Application	Inbound / Outbound	Other Considerations and Timeout Guidelines
WSM-PM access	FW1	7010 Range: 7010 - 7999	HTTP / WLS_WSM-PMn	Inbound	Set the timeout to 60 seconds.
BI Server access	FW1	9704	HTTP / WLS_BIn	Inbound	Timeout varies based on the type of process model used for BI.
Communication between BI Cluster members	n/a	9704	TCP/IP Unicast	n/a	By default, this communication uses the same port as the server's listen address.
Database access for BI Server and BI Publisher JDBC data sources	FW1	Listening port for client connections to the listener	SQL*Net	Inbound/Outbound	Timeout depends on all database content and on the type of process model used for BI.