[CC] Multiple Gateways

[larsonr]

Has anyone encoutered using multiple gateways off a load balancer?

If so, what I'm trying to have happen is when you're logged into Cognos from one gateway I need it be logged in as well from the other gateway for that user.  This will allow me to call it by the load balancer with no worries about which gateway it will hit.

Any thoughts or ideas?

[COGNOiSe administrator]

When going through load balancer, session affinity MUST BE SET. No exceptions.

[larsonr]

We did have that but the problem wasn't so much with Cognos connection.

We are hosting the URL's in another application to give it the look of one custom app.  Turns out we were able to solve the problem by creating a domain cookie.  This allowed all the servers in our BI environment to be signed on at once.  The problem was in our Labor System, each time the user hit the link the load balancer could throwing them either gateway since it was a  full URL.  "Sticky" wasn't working with this methodology.

Just letting everyone know we solved our problem.

[COGNOiSe administrator]

Thanks for sharing!

[Skidly]

Curious as to what SESSION AFIINITY is??

[larsonr]

Session affinity is when you tell your load balancer when you see this user on this session route all their requests to the same web server the session started on.

My problem is that the load balancer kept thinking that each URL request from Cognos was a new session.  Any request by Cognos search ID was just fine (normal Cognos Connection), but when using the urls in an external application, all chaos broke loose.

By having the cookies that Cognos writes set as Domain cookies, it allowed the load balancer to do its thing and we haven't had problems since.

[Skidly]

Thanks.

I am using a BigIP F5 load blancer, IIS.
Web Load Balancer - WEB1 Web2, App load balancer App1 App2.

when we have the app load balancer in the mix and go straight to Web1 or Web2 to access the app, everything is fine.

When we put the load balancer for the web servers in the mix,
and go through the web load balancer to access the app we see a great slowdown in navigating the app and have very slow screen painting going on.

[COGNOiSe administrator]

Is session affinity set on the BigIP?

[Skidly]

For the app and web f5
A default persistence profile (affinity) is set to source_addr on both pools

[COGNOiSe administrator]

I personally wouldn't put a load balancer in front of the app servers. Let Cognos 8 figure out load balancing, it is more efficient anyway, since it pays attention to current load.

[Skidly]

Good point.  Thanks.

App server F5 doesn't give us a performance problem.
The Web F5 with or without the APP F5 slows us down.

Pretty sure this has to be a client specific outside of Cognos, as this "should"  :) be pretty straight forward with Cognos and F5 setup.

Thanks for all your help and insight.

[goose]

Hi Larsonr - I have the exact same setup as you, we have a nlb in front of two gateways and we also have some basic 3rd party web apps that are really glorified menus, they have tree controls with links to cognos reports which are rendered in iframes on the same page. What kind of issues were you experiencing? How do you set the cognos cookies to be domain cookies?

[jeffowentn]

We have a similar configuration that we are testing with the F5 sitting in front of two gateway/web servers.  We are currently using Foundy for our load balancer, but we are wanting to get off of that and move to F5.  We're receiving the same issues with the screen images taking longer to load, and we are also experiencing issues with the past history in the Administration not loading at all...????

Anyone have any thoughts on this?  We have session affinity turned on for the F5.

Jeff

p.s.  We are on Cognos 8.4.1 BI/Planning.