Stingray Traffic Manager Solution Guide

Transcription

1 SOLUTION GUIDE Stingray Traffic Manager Solution Guide Oracle E Business Suite Release 12 Riverbed Technical Marketing

2 2013 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. Riverbed, Cloud Steelhead, Granite, Interceptor, RiOS, Steelhead, Think Fast, Virtual Steelhead, Whitewater, Mazu, Cascade, Cascade Pilot, Shark, AirPcap, SkipWare, TurboCap, WinPcap, Wireshark, and Stingray are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed herein cannot be used without the prior written consent of Riverbed Technology or their respective owners. Akamai and the Akamai wave logo are registered trademarks of Akamai Technologies, Inc. SureRoute is a service mark of Akamai. Apple and Mac are registered trademarks of Apple, Incorporated in the United States and in other countries. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc. and its affiliates in the United States and in other countries. EMC, Symmetrix, and SRDF are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation and its affiliates in the United States and in other countries. IBM, iseries, and AS/400 are registered trademarks of IBM Corporation and its affiliates in the United States and in other countries. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States and in other countries. Microsoft, Windows, Vista, Outlook, and Internet Explorer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and in other countries. Oracle and JInitiator are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation in the United States and in other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and in other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. VMware, ESX, ESXi are trademarks or registered trademarks of VMware, Incorporated in the United States and in other countries Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 2

3 Contents Stingray Traffic Manager Solution Guide...1 Oracle E Business Suite Release Riverbed Technical Marketing Solution Overview Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager Oracle E-Business Suite Prerequisites: Oracle E-Business Suite deployment with Stingray... 7 Update E Business Suite Applications Context File Stingray Traffic Manager Configuration Overview Creating Traffic IP Groups Creating Pools Creating Virtual Servers... 8 HTTPS Redirect Virtual Server Changing the Load Balancing Algorithm Configuring Session Persistence... 9 Creating a new session persistence class... 9 Attaching the session persistence class to a pool Creating and Configuring the Health Monitors... 9 Creating the HTTP monitor... 9 Attaching the monitor to a pool Creating and Configuring TrafficScript Configuring SSL Decryption Importing the Certificate Enabling SSL Decryption on the Virtual Server Configuration Summary of Application on Traffic Manager Monitoring Conclusion About Riverbed Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 3

4 1.0 Solution Overview 1.1 Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager Despite increasing traffic loads, rapid change, and complex deployment infrastructures, online applications are still expected to deliver consistently excellent service levels. Stingray traffic management solutions provide complete control over user traffic, allowing administrators to accelerate, optimize, and secure key business applications. Now it s possible to deliver these services more quickly and ensure the best possible performance across any deployment platform. Application delivery controllers accelerate transactions, maximize availability, manage security policies, and provide a point of control to monitor and manage application traffic. Stingray Traffic Manager is a software-based ADC that provides unprecedented scale and flexibility to deliver applications across the widest range of environments, from physical and virtual data centers to public and hybrid clouds. Stingray Traffic Manager Benefits include: Speed: Accelerate services, increase capacity, and reduce costs by offloading performance-draining tasks such as SSL and compression onto Stingray Traffic Manager s optimized implementations. Cache commonly requested content and optimize traffic delivery to applications so they ll run as fast as they would in a perfect benchmark environment. Reliability: Improve application availability by intelligently distributing traffic, avoiding failed or degraded servers, monitoring performance problems, and shaping traffic spikes. Improved security: Stingray Traffic Manager operates as a deny-all gateway, only admitting traffic types it has been configured to admit. This provides full control over how traffic is internally routed. High-performance inspection can interrogate any part of a request or response to apply global filtering or scrubbing policies. The Stingray Application Firewall option also protects against a broad range of web application attacks. Ease of management: Stingray Traffic Manager makes it easy to manage how users interact with applications and the infrastructure those applications depend on. Use it to shape, prioritize, and route traffic, to drain infrastructure resources prior to maintenance, and to upgrade user sessions across application instances, all while preserving the user experience that business demands. 1.2 Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle E-Business Suite is a fully integrated, comprehensive suite of business applications for the enterprise which provides better business information for effective decision-making and enables an adaptive enterprise for optimal responsiveness. With hundreds of cross-industry capabilities spanning enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain planning, Oracle E-Business Suite applications help customers manage the complexities of global business environments no matter if the organization is small, medium, or large in size. As part of Oracle s Applications Unlimited strategy, Oracle E-Business Suite applications will continue to be enhanced, thus protecting and extending the value of your software investment. 2.0 Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Architecture The Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 architecture, as shown in the figure below, is a framework for multi-tiered, distributed computing that supports various Oracle Applications products. In this model, various servers are distributed among multiple levels, or tiers. A server is a process or group of processes that runs on a single machine and provides a particular class of functionality, often referred to as a service. For example, the Oracle HTTP server is a process that listens for and processes HTTP requests; a Concurrent Processing server is a server that process batch jobs submitted through concurrent requests Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 4

5 The three-tier architecture that comprises an Oracle E-Business Suite installation is made up of: 1. The database tier, which supports and manages the Oracle database 2. The application tier, which supports and manages the various Applications components, and is sometimes known as the middle tier 3. The desktop tier, which provides the user interface via a supported web browser, either natively in HTML or via Forms running in the Sun Java Runtime Engine For more information on Oracle E-Business Suite, see Here are some key definitions as they apply to E-Business Suite: Tier A tier is a logical grouping of services, potentially spread across more than one physical machine. Client Tier The client interface is provided through HTML for the HTML-based applications, and via a Java applet in a Web browser for the traditional Forms-based interface. In Oracle Applications Release 12, each user logs in to Oracle Applications through the E- Business Suite Home Page on a desktop client web browser. The E-Business Suite Home Page provides a single point of access to HTML-based applications, Forms-based applications, and Business Intelligence applications. Application Tier The application tier hosts the various services that process the business logic and manage communication between the desktop tier and the database tier. This tier runs the web server and the associated processes, concurrent processing server, Interaction and Oracle fulfillment server. Database Tier The database tier contains the Oracle database server which stores all the data maintained by Oracle Applications. This tier has the Oracle data server files and Oracle Applications database executables that physically store the tables, indexes, and other database objects in the system. OPMN Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server (OPMN) is installed and configured on every tier designated to run the web application. OPMN provides an integrated way to manage all Oracle Application Server components. OPMN consists of two main pieces: the Process Manager and the Notification Server. The Process manager (PM) is the centralized process management mechanism in Oracle Application Server and is used to manage all Oracle Application Server processes. The PM starts, restarts, stops, and monitors every process it manages. It also performs death-detection and automatic restart of the processes. Oracle 2013 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 5

6 Notification Server (ONS) is the transport mechanism for failure, recovery, startup, and other related notifications between components in Oracle Application Server. OHS Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) is installed and configured on every tier that is designated to run the web application. It provides the key infrastructure required for serving the static and dynamic content generated by Oracle E Business Suite products. OC4J Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) is the core Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) runtime component of Oracle Application Server. It is installed and configured on every tier that is designated to run the web application. It is a fully J2EE 1.5 compliant container that runs on a standard file based JDK 1.5 Java Virtual Machine and provides complete support for Java Server Pages (JSP), Servlets, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Web Services and all J2EE services. Web Entry Point Web Entry Point refers to the host name which is designated to be used by all users to access the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 system. By default, the web entry point is set to the hostname of the application server where Oracle E-Business Suite is installed. In the case where a load-balancer is used, the Web Entry Point becomes the virtual host name resolved to the virtual IP of the load-balancer. Session Persistence Session Persistence is the act of keeping a specific user's traffic going to the same server that was initially hit when the site was contacted for the first HTTP transaction. This is especially important for E-Business Suite as various modules bundled with the suite need to maintain session state. Session persistence is sometimes referred to as "server stickiness." Server Load Balancer Load balancing is the means by which network traffic directed to a particular Web site is divided between one or more machines in a cluster of servers. Typically, the servers will all be running the same application, and use of load balancing presents the outside world with the appearance of a single server rather than a cluster. The relevant hardware device, in our case, software, often called a server load balancer, receives the relevant network traffic for the site, and distributes it to the various servers in the cluster based on the load balancing methodology that it supports. By sending requests to different nodes within the server cluster, system performance is optimized, scalability is simplified, and application availability (a key requirement of Web-based applications) is greatly enhanced. Additional features of load balancing include monitoring server availability and context-based load distribution. Typical load balancer deployment is shown below: 2013 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 6

7 2.1 Prerequisites: Oracle E-Business Suite deployment with Stingray The following are the general prerequisites for Oracle E Business Suite Integration with Riverbed Stingray: 1. You must have an existing Oracle E Business Suite deployment 2. Please make sure the Riverbed Stingray server is able to ping the Oracle EBS Application servers The following references will help you understand the concepts related to this integration: 1. Using Load-Balancers with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Oracle Support Document ID ). 2. Oracle E Business Suite R12.0 information Center (Oracle Support Document ID ) Update E Business Suite Applications Context File Certain configuration values needs to be changed in the application context file to enable Stingray Traffic Manager. The table below describes an example of the context values changed with Stingray Traffic Manager configured in front of the application servers. Context Variable Name Old Context Value s_webentryprotocol http https s_webentryhost riverbedapp1 riverbedapp2 riverbedapp2 New Context Value s_webentrydomain company.com company.com s_activewebport s_login_page s_external_url app app app The values listed for the context variables in the table above should only be used as a reference to change your applications context file. It is possible that system administrators may have changed the default values to perform other advanced configurations. After completing the changes shown above, do the following: 1. Run the AutoConfig utility on all the application tier Servers 2. Restart application server processes 3. Test sign on from different entry points Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 7

8 3.0 Stingray Traffic Manager Configuration This section contains step by step instructions on configuring Stingray Traffic Manager to work with Oracle E-Business Suite Overview This section steps through the needed steps to configure Traffic Manager to load balance Oracle E-Business suite. 3.2 Creating Traffic IP Groups A Traffic IP Group (also known as a Virtual IP) will need to be created on which the Virtual server will be listening on. To create a new Traffic IP Group navigate to Services Traffic IP Groups and scroll down to Create a new Traffic IP Group. Fill in the fields as follows: Name: A descriptive name for the Traffic IP Group, i.e. app.company.com for the Oracle E-Business application. IP Addresses: An IP Address that will be associated to FQDN of the Oracle E-Business application. 3.3 Creating Pools A Pool will need to be created for each service managed by the Traffic Manager. To create a new Pool navigate to Services Pools and scroll down to Create a new Pool. Fill in the fields as follows: Pool Name: A descriptive name for the pool Nodes: hostname:port or ipaddress:port for each of the actual back-end nodes. Monitor: Leave as Ping for now. This will be covered in detail in Creating and Configuring the Health Monitors section. 3.4 Creating Virtual Servers Each pool will need to be associated with a Virtual Server. Create two Virtual servers of which one virtual server is just to redirect traffic back onto HTTPS if client inadvertently accesses the application over HTTP. To create a new Virtual Server 1. Navigate to Services Virtual Servers and scroll down to Create a new Virtual Server and Enter the following Virtual Server Name: A descriptive name for the Virtual Server Protocol: HTTP Port: 443 Default Traffic Pool: Select the pool created in the previous section 2. Click on Create Virtual Server 3. In next screen under Listening on: select Traffic IP Groups and Check appropriate Traffic IP group that was created earlier HTTPS Redirect Virtual Server 1. Navigate to Services Virtual Servers and scroll down to Create a new Virtual Server and Enter the following Virtual Server Name: A descriptive name for the Virtual Server Protocol: HTTP Port: 80 Default Traffic Pool: discard 2. Click on Create Virtual Server 3.5 Changing the Load Balancing Algorithm The default Stingray load balancing algorithm is Round Robin but for Oracle E-Business application service we will change the load balancing algorithm to be Least Connections. 1. Navigate to Services Pools and select one of the pools created in the previous steps 2. Scroll down and click on Load Balancing 3. Set the loading balancing algorithm to Least Connections 2013 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 8

9 3.6 Configuring Session Persistence Oracle E-Business suite application requires some form of session persistence. This section details the steps to configure session persistence. Creating a new session persistence class A session persistence class only needs to be created once per type of persistence. For Oracle E-Business suite application Transparent session affinity can be used. Appropriate persistence class will need to be created. 1. Navigate to Catalogs Persistence 2. Scroll down and create a new Session Persistence class 3. Set the type to Transparent Session Affinity Attaching the session persistence class to a pool 1. Navigate to Services Pools and select the pool that the monitor will be attached to. 2. Scroll down and click on Session Persistence 3. Choose the appropriate Session Persistence class 3.7 Creating and Configuring the Health Monitors The following sections detail the steps to create these health monitors Creating the HTTP monitor The HTTP monitor is used for port 8000 on the Oracle E-Business suite application servers 1. Navigate to Catalogs Monitors 2. Scroll down to Create new monitor 3. Give the new monitor a Name. Set the type to HTTP and the scope to Node 4. Click Create Monitor to create the monitor 5. In the subsequent configuration page scroll down change the path to / 6. Change body_regex to.* Attaching the monitor to a pool After the monitor has been created they need to be attached to the appropriate pool. 1. Navigate to Services Pools and select the pool that the monitor will be attached to. 2. Scroll down and click on Health Monitoring 3. Add the appropriate health monitor. 3.8 Creating and Configuring TrafficScript One of the virtual servers created above sends HTTPS redirects to clients who inadvertently try to access the application over HTTP. This is accomplished by creating a TrafficScript and associating the TrafficScript to this virtual server. In order to create the TrafficScript : 1. Navigate to Catalogs Rules 2. Scroll down to Create new rule 3. Give the new rule a Name. 4. Select Use TrafficScript Language and click Create Rule 5. Under the Rule: space enter the following text: $hostheader = http.gethostheader(); $path = http.getpath(); http.redirect( " ); 6. Click Update button to create the rule 2013 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 9

10 Associate the above created TrafficScript to virtual server: 1. Navigate to Services --> Virtual Server 2. Click the Virtual server which was created for HTTPS redirect 3. Click on Rules 4. Under Request Rules select the rule that was created in the above step from dropdown 5. Click Add Rule 3.9 Configuring SSL Decryption As Oracle E-Business applications servers will be accessed over SSL Stingray Traffic Manager should first decrypt the SSL session and then send plain text HTTP to the server. This section details the steps to perform SSL decryption and re-encryption Importing the Certificate In order to perform SSL decryption, the certificate and private key used the Oracle E-Business suite application server must be imported to the Stingray. 1. Navigate to Catalogs -> SSL -> SSL Certificates catalog 2. Click on Import Certificate to import the appropriate certificate Enabling SSL Decryption on the Virtual Server After importing the certificate, SSL Decryption can now be performed 1. Navigate to Services -> Virtual Servers and select the virtual server that will be doing the SSL Decryption 2. Scroll down and click on SSL Decryption 3. Set ssl_decrypt to Yes 4. Select the certificate imported in the previous step 4.0 Configuration Summary of Application on Traffic Manager By accessing the Services Config Summary on the webgui a complete snapshot of all the configured services is provided. This is very useful table to glance through to get a good understanding of how the services are configured. 5.0 Monitoring The Stingray Traffic Manager has some great tools to assist in managing and monitoring your online application traffic. These can be accessed via the web UI of the device, via the Activity tab. Real-time graphing can be used to show the traffic passing through the STM in a very granular way, you can change the data being monitored down to an individual node, or see all the traffic for the entire deployment. There are also a map view, and connection list to aid further visibility of the traffic Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 10

11 6.0 Conclusion This document briefly discusses how to configure Stingray Traffic Manager to load balance traffic to a farm of Oracle E-Business suite application servers. Stingray Traffic Manager is able to manage traffic in a wide variety of ways, to improve the performance, security, reliability and integrity. Please refer to the product documentation on the Riverbed Community Forums ( for examples of how Stingray Traffic Manager can be deployed to meet a range of service hosting problems. About Riverbed Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at Riverbed Technology, Inc. 199 Fremont Street San Francisco, CA Tel: (415) Riverbed Technology Ltd. One Thames Valley Wokingham Road, Level 2 Bracknell. RG42 1NG United Kingdom Tel: Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd. 391A Orchard Road #22-06/10 Ngee Ann City Tower A Singapore Tel: Riverbed Technology K.K. Shiba-Koen Plaza Building 9F 3-6-9, Shiba, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan Tel: Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 11

12 2013 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 12