OBIEE 12c clustered analytics URL

saketsrv

Hi,

I have OBIEE 12c set up Ver. 12.2.1.2.0 with enterprise install and horizontally scaled out in two nodes.

So now i got Host1(primary node) and Host2(secondry node).

I now have 2 set of analytics URL like one for Host1 and one for Host 2 (e.g Host1:9502/analytics and Host2:9502/analytics)

But i  want to show only one analytics url to the end user .

Is there any way or document i can i re-route it to single URL instead of having 2 URL's.

Gianni Ceresa

That's what a load balancer is used for.

It isn't OBIEE business to do that job, you wanted 2 nodes so it's you that must provide requests to the 2 nodes and that's done by a load balancer.

As alternative a proxy can also (often at least) manage that case, for example nginx can easily proxy queries to both nodes.

saketsrv

Thanks for the reply Gianni.

I will take a note of that but just want to know,is there any i way i can configure it internally through weblogic ,if so,will it be a good choice or rather i should go with big IP or nginx load balancer configuration.

Gianni Ceresa

As far as I know Weblogic doesn't provide that.

It's an application server, a good one, but not really a proxy or a load balancer.

So it's something you definitely need to manage outside.

saketsrv

Hi Gianni,

Apologies for re-opening this thread after closing but since you were not sure about using weblogic as a load balance,i did a bit of research and found one article that suggest the same.

https://redstack.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/using-weblogic-as-a-load-balancer/

Also,OHS being completely different product and using big- ip f5 or nginx would require licencing,i was thinking to configure lb internally.

Can you please advice if i am heading into right direction or not.

Gianni Ceresa

I suspected somebody did it with Weblogic

I would first point out licensing: if you have OBIEE licenses you aren't allowed to use the full Weblogic for other things if you do not own a Weblogic license. There are limitation in that direction which is better to find out first.

OHS is a "kind of" Apache HTTP Server (at least based on it).

Apache HTTP Server or nginx are free (nginx is free or has a paid version), other solutions require a license as you said (and can be quite expensive).

HA Proxy is a opensource loadbalancer.

So there are many free / opensource solutions (and tools used by big companies, so not "garbage free tools").

Using Weblogic as loadbalancer to me it's like buying a Ferrari for doing off-roading : it has wheels and an engine, but it's definitely not the best car for that need.

I was talking about Nginx as an example because with 1 process and few Mb of RAM you get lot more performance than what Weblogic will give you with 1Gb of RAM and a bunch of java processes all around.

Another point in using an external solution you put in front is that if your weblogic on the server you decide to use as loadbalancer is down, even if your second node is up and waiting request, users will get an error back as the loadbalancer is down. An external tool is safer from that point of view and will allow you to take one node out of the targets so you can do maintenance, put back in the targets and take the other down for the same maintenance : your users will not see anything, the loadbalancer will send them from one node to the other based on your maintenance requirements.

saketsrv

Thanks for the valuable inputs.I will now think of external lb for sure !!