Load balancing approach

Dear Listers:

We are planning to implement JDE 9 on OAS and anticipate a user load ranging from 30-50 (concurrent) initially, to 200-250 within 2 years. OAS 10.1.3 supports software vertical and horizontal clustering using OAS tools, do any of you have good results with this approach?

The other option is a hardware solution (F5) but given the initial user load it may be more cost effective to wait until the demand picks up.

Your experience and feedback is appreciated.

Thanks!

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Dear Listers:

We are planning to implement JDE 9 on OAS and anticipate a user load ranging from 30-50 (concurrent) initially, to 200-250 within 2 years. OAS 10.1.3 supports software vertical and horizontal clustering using OAS tools, do any of you have good results with this approach?

The other option is a hardware solution (F5) but given the initial user load it may be more cost effective to wait until the demand picks up.

Your experience and feedback is appreciated.

Thanks!

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My first question is - Why OAS? that is a dead-end product. You should go with Weblogic or Websphere. They will be around for the long haul. OAS is at the end of it's shelflife.

A hardware load balancer is a great solution. We are using one now in front of our six weblogic boxes. There are some software load balancing options out there, but they don't compare to hardware, especially if that is where you plan on ending up anyway. Just my $.02

Simple round robin for your setup is cheap and easy.

Hardware is nice and allows you to utilize the expiration headers more efficiently.

For us, the cost is not required for hardware when a simple ASP page will do.

We are at 120 concurrent users. When we get in the 300-500 range or need to trim bandwidth even more, we will look at the F5.

[ QUOTE ]
My first question is - Why OAS? that is a dead-end product. You should go with Weblogic or Websphere. They will be around for the long haul. OAS is at the end of it's shelflife.

A hardware load balancer is a great solution. We are using one now in front of our six weblogic boxes. There are some software load balancing options out there, but they don't compare to hardware, especially if that is where you plan on ending up anyway. Just my $.02

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed, WLS is the way to go. We've had success with virtual machines and load-balancing as well. Lots of options out there. And, more cowbell...

Hi,

I have created a very scalable load balancing solution using F5. We not only use it to load balance E1 web server but also app servers. I have used IBM Websphere so I can speak about that only. Not sure about other options

Our requirement was over 3000 user over time hence,we went this route. THis way, we can add new server to the F5 pool when we want it and remove it one at time for any maintenance.


If your requirement is just load balance and not fault tolerance, then I would suggest getting a very powerful server with lots of memory. Create multiple JVM's on the same web server
Hence your user will come to jde:81 port, IBM websphere will then load balance across multiple JVM's ( e.g 9081,9082, 9083 and so on). This is cheap( hopefully cheaper thatn f5 switch) and probably dirty way to achieve results without getting whole F5 content switch involved. Keep in mind, this will get you load balance, but still be single point of failure.

You need to determine, how heavy is your user load. We did our analysis and found we can really support upto 100 user per JVM, but decided to go with 50 as bench mark, as users sometime may do thing that might highjack the JVM.

just my 2 cents

I'd like to extend this question and ask for opinions on vertical load balancing for WebLogic.

During an upgrade, we are planning to implement in WebLogic with four 4x4 (CPUxGB) servers for 150 users (Without getting into the sizing details I know that will prove to be overkill). We planned to use HW load balancing between these 4 separate instances of WebLogic. The Infrastructure team has asked if I would consider building two servers instead with 2 quad-cores and 8GB memory each. From my WebSphere experience, I would prefer to keep the user count to each instance under 50, so that would mean we would need vertical instances for each server. However, I had heard vertical instances were not recommended for performance reasons.

My question for the listers is whether it would be better to load balance four instances across four separate machines or across two machine with vertical instances? Does it matter much?

Thanks
Doug

Each instance is taking 1-1.5 GB of memory. Stacking a couple instances per OS would be OK in my opinion. The boxes are more memory heavy than CPU. Why waste memory on maintaining another OS.

Granted, we have horizontal and vertical balancing. But, that is mostly due to DR and scheduled maintenance reasons.

I have not experience any performance issues with vertical clustering. We have both horizontal and Vertical on servers that are virtualized in out PROD environment and currently our usage ranges up to 250 without any issues.

If I may why the choice to go with WebLogis instead of WebSphere?

Why WebSphere vs. WebLogic? The corporate infrastructure team does not have WebSphere experience and it is not in our Enterprise Architecture.