VERTICAL CLUSTERING IN OBIEE

Vertical scaling in OBIEE means adding more Business Intelligence Components to the same computer to make use of the hardware resources. There are cases when the middleware hardware is sized with many CPUs and more Memory, so in order to make use of them then we have to do vertical scaling.

Where Vertical Clustering is to do more with one BI components in one server, horizontal clustering deals more with configuring multiple instances of BI server in different boxes. This is useful not only for load sharing, but also at times when one server is down. There are more to the world of Horizontal Clustering. But I will cover this in my later post.

Coming back to Vertical Clustering…

Though there were some workaround available in 10g, Vertical Clustering has been introduced in 11g.

Unlike Horizontal, this does not provide high availability when the server itself goes down. In this type of clustering generally 3 components are clustered

1. BI Server
2. BI Presentation Services
3. Java Host

That is, all the components that can act in active-active configuration can be clustered in Vertical Clustering. Other components like Scheduler, Cluster Controller which work in active-passive fashion are generally not clustered vertically.

* Log Into EM

* Navigate to the deployment section. (Since we are doing vertical clustering, we do not need to have a shared drive for the repository & the web catalogs. But again its better to identify a drive that can potentially be shared in the future with other machines as Vertical Clustering does not provide high availability (for future migration to horizontal clustering)).

* Once the drive is identified (one for RPD and the other for Web Catalog), copy the web catalog to the shared drive. In the deployment section of the Enterprise Manager, enter the shared directory details of both the RPD and the Web Catalog.

* Upload the repository (RPD) into the shared drive using the enterprise manager.

* Access the Fusion Middleware Control 11g.

* Select core application under Business Intelligence

* Select Capacity Management.

* Go to Scalability tab and click Lock and Edit Configuration. Now the Enterprise Manager will allow editing the values.

This will automatically create new instances(within the main instance) in BI EE for both the BI Server and Presentation Server(after Activating the changes). We can validate this by looking at the number of directories under

{ORACLEINSTANCE}/bifoundation/OracleBIServerComponent and

{ORACLEINSTANCE}/bifoundation/OracleBIPresentationServerComponent

Since we selected two, 2 new directories will be created for the new BI Server and Presentation Server that we added through the EM. Lets now start these new components through the capacity management interface

Once the scaling out is completed, opmn will be aware of the newly created components.

Till Next Time!