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Portal Server on an Application Server Cluster
154 Portal Server 6 2005Q1 • Deployment Planning Guide
Running Portal Server on an application server enables you to:
• Decouple the portal platform from the application server platform, allowing
you to choose the best combination of Portal Server and application server for
your organization
• Call Enterprise JavaBeans™ architechture and other J2EE™ technologies that
run in the application server container
• Use application server clustering, which provides scalability and high
availability
• Use session failover in clustering (currently available on BEA WebLogic
Server™ and Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition).
Portal Server on an Application Server Cluster
This section describes how Application Server Enterprise Edition software, BEA
WebLogic Server™, and IBM WebSphere® Application Server manage application
server clustering. Application server clustering is a loosely coupled group of
application servers that collaborate to provide shared access to the services that
each server hosts. The cluster aims to balance resource requests, high availability of
resources, and failover of application logic to provide scalability. Portal Server and
Access Manager are not pure web applications. Instead, these applications are
composed of local files residing on a machine and three web applications: portal,
amserver, and amconsole. These three web applications run in a web application
container, which runs in an application server web application container.
The Java Enterprise System installs and configures the local files, configures the
local application server, then deploys the three WAR files on the local web
application container. The WAR files themselves are not self-contained. The WAR
files depend on the local files and directories on the machine to provide their
service.
An application server cluster is a logical entity that groups many application server
instances, potentially hosted on different machines. Pure web applications are
deployed on a cluster using application server specific deployment tools. Once
deployed on the cluster, the web applications are deployed to all the server
instances that the cluster is made of, and managed in a central way.
Because of Portal Server’s dual nature, as a local application as well as a web
application, install Portal Server on an application server using the following steps:
1. Install Portal Server on all machines using the same configuration settings.