Software and hardware topologies

 

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Software topology

For each installation of portal, an installation of WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is required, and both the portal and WAS installations must reside on the same machine.

HTTP is used as the transport protocol for portal requests. By default, WebSphere Portal uses the the internal HTTP transport within WAS to handle these requests. You can optionally configure an external Web server, such as IBM HTTP Server, to work with WebSphere Portal.

By default, WebSphere Portal installs a Cloudscape database to store information about user identities, credentials, and permissions for accessing portal resources. You can optionally configure WebSphere Portal to use other databases such as DB2 or Oracle.

WebSphere Portal and WAS require access to a user registry. The following list provides different sources that can be used:

By default, WebSphere Portal installs the Cloudscape database and uses it for authentication. You can configure WebSphere Portal to use an LDAP directory to store user information and to authenticate users.

Portlets are key to the portal experience, and WebSphere Portal has built-in portlets that interface with tooling that extends portal functionality. The Lotus products, such as Lotus Team Workplace and Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, are used with WebSphere Portal to provide collaborative features. Portlets are also provided to integrate with extended search capabilities.

Here is an example topology of WebSphere Portal...

  1. WebSphere Portal installs and runs as an appserver on the WAS platform. Additional components components include:

    1. Administration portlets
    2. Collaboration portlets
    3. Search engine
    4. Document Manager
    5. Productivity Components
    6. Portlets
    7. Transcoding
    8. Member Manager

  2. A database is required to store WebSphere Portal configuration data.

  3. An LDAP source can be used for authentication and authorization within the portal. The authentication component is responsible for authenticating users at login. The authentication component checks whether the credentials that a user provided match with the assumed identity. If the credentials are verified successfully, the user is logged in and a session is established. Also, an external security manager can be used for authentication.

    In addition, the authorization component is the single access control decision point within the portal. It controls access to all sensitive portal resources, like for example compositions or portlets.

  4. Portlets talk to Lotus collaborative products.

  5. Portlets talk to additional software.

 

Hardware topology examples

WAS supports a wide variety of ways to deploy the portal in your computing environment. Commonly used topologies fall into one of the following broad categories.

  • Single-machine topology. The components are installed on the same machine.

  • Multimachine topologies. The components (the Web server, appserver, databases, and so forth) are physically separated onto different machines.

  • Vertical scaling topologies. Additional WebSphere Portal processes are created on a single physical machine through vertical cloning.

  • Horizontal scaling topologies. Additional WebSphere Portal processes are created on multiple physical machines through horizontal cloning. HTTP redirector products can also be used to implement horizontal cloning. Clustering is most effective in environments that use horizontal cloning because of the ability to build in redundancy and failover, and to improve scalability by adding heterogeneous systems into the cluster.

  • HTTP server separation topologies. The Web (HTTP) server is located on a different physical machine than WAS and WebSphere Portal.

  • Demilitarized zone (DMZ) topologies. Firewalls can be used to create demilitarized zones -- machines that are isolated from both the public Internet and other machines in the configuration. This improves portal security, especially for sensitive back-end resources such as databases.

Note: It is important to remember that, in any topology, many resources and settings that are defined within WAS, like Global Security Settings, DataSources, and so on, are shared across all applications, including the portal instance.

 

See also

 

WebSphere is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

 

IBM is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

 

Tivoli is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.