Serving Multiple Cognos Gateway servers (Web Servers) with a loadbalancer

[tward]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to find some documentation on configuration of a load balancer to service 2 Cognos Gateway servers.  So far I have not had much success.  Can anyone point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance

[smiley]

Configuring a load balancer for cognos, is not a cognos task.
Did your's not come with a manual on how configure it|?

[jeffowentn]

We have a load balancer in place to route traffic across both gateway servers.  I cannot find documentation regarding how to configure the Cognos side of the equation, and Cognos does not support load balancer questions.  I am hoping someone on here can share some wisdom.

We are running 8.4.1 (FP3 BI, and FP2 EP) across multiple servers.  We have two gateway servers with a number of thick-client planning users and roughly 400 Contributor web users.  We are moving towards leveraging the BI tools to assist our planning users, too.  Consequently, we need to ensure performance and uptime, which is why we are putting the load balancer in place.

Currently, we have two different URLs, depending on whether the web users are authenticated based on their OS credentials (using Access Manager / Sun LDAP) or whether they enter a username and password (non-trusted domain users).  Both URLs are on the same port, and we are using headers to route traffic to the appropriate page.

The best I understand it, we have the load balancer in place "listening" for either URL.  Once traffic comes across the URL, it will then route to one of the two gateway servers using a virtual IP.  Given that we have two different URLs, can I simply put the VIP in the Gateway URI in Cognos Configuration so that it will handle requests from either URL?

I believe I need to also have the DNS entries changed, so I will work with my network guy on this.

I have seen references to session affinity/sticky settings and also creating domain cookies.  This is all new territory for me.

Any additional information you can provide would be greatly appreciated, as we are rapidly approaching our next budget cycle.  If you need further info from me, just ask.

Jeff