Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Clustering and WebSphere Portal Express
This section describes how to install WebSphere Portal Express and set up a cluster environment. Clusters are sets of servers that are managed together and participate in workload management.
WebSphere Portal Express support in clustered environments includes the following features:
- WebSphere Portal Express configuration tasks are cell aware, in that the tasks can determine whether the node is federated and then act accordingly.
- WebSphere Portal Express nodes running on different operating systems are supported in the same cluster, enabling you to install WebSphere Portal Express using different install paths if you so choose.
- The activate-portlets task can be used to activate the WebSphere Portal Express portlets across all cluster members at one time.
- Planning for cluster
Before installing WebSphere Portal Express for use in a managed node or as part of a cluster, review these important guidelines and limitations. - Setting up a cluster
For high availability production environments, set up a clustered deployment of multiple servers running IBM® WebSphere® Portal Express and IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment. - Configuring for HTTP session failover
Enable HTTP session failover in your cluster to enable multiple cluster members to serve data in the event that one of them fails. - Using Search in a cluster
To support Portal Search in a clustered environment, install and configure search for remote search service on an IBM WebSphere Application Server node that is not part of the IBM WebSphere Portal Express cluster. To enable search in a cluster for content created using Document Manager or the Authoring portlet provided with Web Content Management, configure each machine in the cluster to access a shared directory. - Updating Personalization properties in a cluster
IBM WebSphere Portal Express provides two property files that you can modify to customize the Personalization feature. - Preparing non-portal nodes for Member Manager security
After the cluster is created, set up non-portal node security access to the Member Manager datasource. - Sharing database domains between clusters
To help provide redundancy and failover support in production environments composed of multiple clusters, you can share database domains between those clusters. - Setting up an i5/OS database in a cluster
To communicate with a database, servers running IBM i5/OS can use either of two JDBC drivers: the IBM Toolbox for Java JDBC driver or the IBM Developer Kit for Java JDBC driver (also referred to as the native JDBC driver). Which JDBC driver you should use depends on how you are setting up your clustered environment. - Managing the cluster
This section provides information on how to manage the different instances of each part of your cluster, including portlets, themes and skins, WAS, scripting, SSO, WMM, and security. - Maintaining the cluster
Maintaining WebSphere Portal Express in a cluster typically means applying corrective service (fix packs and interim fixes) or updating the software release level on each node in the cluster. Instructions for applying corrective service to a WebSphere Portal Express cluster are provided with the corrective service package. Before applying any maintenance, it is always important to analyze any impact to your end users and ensure that you are able to provide uninterrupted service (also referred to as 24x7 availability), even during the maintenance phase. - Uninstalling WebSphere Portal Express from a cluster
This topic describes the available approaches for uninstalling WebSphere Portal Express from a cluster.
Parent topic:
InstallingRelated information
Installing and configuring a Personalization Server cluster