Sometimes there is a need to have OBIEE system operating during planned or unplanned downtime. Because of this reason OBIEE provides a high availability capability: it is possible to configure all OBIEE components in order to offer high availability. In this entry I am going to describe the process of configuring a high available OBIEE 10g system.
Before going to the configuration I want to clarify some concepts:
Availability is the degree to which an application, service, or function is accessible on demand. Based on this concept we can conclude that High Availability is a system continuously operational as long as possible.
High availability systems can be categorized into local high availability systems which are configured in a single data center and disaster recovery solutions systems which are usually geographically distributed. OBI Server only can be configured in the first case; all components of the BI Cluster Server feature must reside on the same LAN.
High availability comes from redundant systems and components. Local high availability solutions can be categorized, by their level of redundancy, into active-active where two or more active instances are working at the same time and active-passive where only one instance is active and others are in standby.
OBIEE provides for high availability through the use of native clustering, failover and load balancing capabilities. Let’s analyze the OBIEE 10g components and how they are communicated in a clustered environment.
