Oracle Traffic Director for High Availability Architectures in the CERN Web Application Ecosystem

Project Specification

Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) is an application layer (layer 7) load-balancer that works as the application delivery control to optimize communication between client and application servers. Starting from version 12.2.1(12c), OTD was released to all platforms and therefore it opens the possibility to implement the OTD without platform limitation and constraint.

The aim of this project is to evaluate the OTD as the front-tier application delivery control for the CERN’s High Availability Web Application Ecosystem, elaborating the OTD’s features and behaviours and its integration with WebLogic server.

Abstract

In the CERN’s Web Application Ecosystem, front-tier or first tier applications, such as Apache and OHS, are used to distribute the traffic to second-tier application, e.g. Tomcat and WebLogic. CERN’s IT-DB has planned to unify the front-tier application and to implement only one product as the front-tier application.

Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) is the middleware product from Oracle that acts as layer-7 software load balancer or application entry point. Since 12c version, OTD has been released to all platforms without the restriction of Oracle hardware or software. Therefore, it is interesting to evaluate the OTD and its features as there is a possibility to use OTD as the front-tier application for the High Availability Architectures in the CERN Web Application Ecosystem.

The major objective of this project is to evaluate the OTD’s features and performances. The evaluation is conducted by reviewing from installation and configuration procedures until the deployment of the OTD’s instances itself. The installation and configuration options are also reviewed to see if OTD can work well in CERN’s Infrastructure and also to see the possibility of generating and automating these procedures. The OTD-WebLogic features integration is evaluated especially for the Dynamic Cluster and Domain Partitioning. In addition in this project, Coherence*Web is also implemented to see the benefits of coherence cluster’s deployment tier regarding to Session replication mechanism.