setup load balancing dispatchers in cognos 8.4

[hiranb]

Hi,

   I have installed cognos 8.4 on single server. Now I had to configure another server as dispatcher. Can anyone provide instructions to do this configuration? Thanks,

[MFGF]

Hi,

Is the second server only being used as a dispatcher (load balancer), or will it be handling application server processing too?

MF.

[hiranb]

The second server is to be used as dispatcher.

[Rutulian]

Is that a dispatcher-that-only-load-balances or a dispatcher-that-does-app-server work too?  What's happening to your first server, is it going to become a gateway only or is it still acting as gateway-dispatcher-appserver-ContentManager?

The install documentation has a good section on what you need to consider in most cases: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/c8bi/v8r4m0/topic/com.ibm.swg.im.cognos.inst_cr_winux.8.4.1.doc/inst_cr_winux_id7267InstallingCognos8ServerComponentsin.html#InstallingCognos8ServerComponentsinaDistributedEnvironment

Kind Regards,
Alexis Lawrence

[MFGF]

The second server is to be used as dispatcher.

I'm not sure that makes sense.  If there is only one Application Server, surely load balancing is redundant as there's only one?

Regardless, the process is pretty much as follows (albeit rather pointless in your situation)

You install the C8 Application Server component onto your new server, then on that server, in Cognos Configuration select the 'IBM Cognos Services' group on the left and disable all services except the Dispatcher service.  Wherever your gateway is installed (normally on the web server machine) you would then go to the Environment tab in Cognos Connection and set the 'Dispatcher URIs for Gateway' to point to your new dispatcher machine.

Finally, for efficiency, you would go into the Admin console on your old (application server) machine and set the dispatcher load balancing option to 'cluster compatible' (this turns off cross-server load balancing between dispatchers, but again, as there are no other application server machines, it's all a bit pointless).

Best regards,

MF.

[RobsWalker68]

Hi,

What is the reasoning behind implementing the dispatcher i.e. what problem are you trying to solve?  Are you looking to provide failover for resilience, load balancing for a performance gain  or both?   As MF has said the envisaged solution won't satisfy either of those aims.

If you think about it your web gateway will receive a request and forward it to the primary dispatcher
(your new one) which in turn only has one application server to pass to.  The existing server will process the request and send it back along the same channel.  If any anything that architecture makes performance and resilience worse not better.

The second server would be much betther deployed as an additional application server configured with either all of the services if you want failover or perhaps a subset of services to meet any specific needs you have.

The Architecture and Deployment guide gives a very good overview of the process flow and if you haven't yet done so it is worthwhile have a read before deciding on a particular architecture.

Kind Regards

Rob