Oracle Traffic Director is a new product with Proxy and Load Balancing functionalities used for fronting Fusion Middleware servers. It is a lightweight, high performance proxy server taking only 150Mb of disk space, with extensive High Availability features. You can find more on the OTD’s features in this Oracle Traffic Director white paper.
OTD is currently released only for the Exalogic platform, so for operating systems other than OEL 64bit you will still have to use the Weblogic plugin for web servers, but OTD will be available for all platforms in the future.
This post will describe the installation and a basic configuration fronting a Weblogic cluster:
1. Download the Oracle Traffic Director installation kit from edelivery:
– After logging in, search for Oracle Fusion Middleware products under the Linux x86-64 platform.
– Click Go, then scroll down to Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 11g Media Pack and click it
– Scroll once again all the way to the bottom and download the “Oracle Traffic Director 11g (11.1.1.6.0) for Exalogic Linux x86-64” archive
2. Copy the archive on the server and unzip it. Execute ../Disk1/runInstaller to start the OTD installer:
Click Ok after setting the desired inventory location.
Click Next in the following screen.
Either set up your Oracle support credentials or choose to skip the software updates in the next screen. Then click “Next”
Make sure that all the prerequisite checks are verified. If any of them failed, leave the installation window open, fix the problem, then run the specific check again. Once all the check are confirmed, click “Next” to go further with the installation.
Choose a directory where the product will be installed. Then click “Next”
Just a installation summary in the next screen, after making sure that all the details are correct, click on Install.
The files are now copied and a confirmation screen will be displayed. The installation is now over.
3. Creating a new Oracle Traffic Director instance
First thing to do is to create a OTD instance:
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/tadm configure-server –-host=localhost --port=1895 --user=oracle --instance-home=production/otd/
Then start the administration server instance, by running
$ORACLE_HOME/admin-server/bin/startserv
From the resulting console messages, note the URL of the administration console, as indicated by the bold text in the following example
Oracle Traffic Director 11.1.1.6.0 B09/04/2011 09:01 [NOTIFICATION:1] [OTD-80118] Using [Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Version 1.6.0_24] from [Sun Microsystems Inc.] [NOTIFICATION:1] [OTD-80000] Loading web module in virtual server [admin-server] at [/admin] [NOTIFICATION:1] [OTD-80000] Loading web module in virtual server [admin-server] at [/jmxconnector] [NOTIFICATION:1] [OTD-10358] admin-ssl-port: https://bin.example.com:1895 ready to accept requests [NOTIFICATION:1] [OTD-10487] successful server startup Create a new configuration and add some origin servers
Now you can access the OTD administration interface at http://localhost:1895
If the page is not accessible, turn off the firewall on the server and try again.
4. To configure this OTD instance to proxy and load balance requests to a backend Weblogic cluster you need to:
– Click “New Configuration” on the right side menu and follow the Wizard to create this configuration
Choose a name for this configuration and a OS user.
Set the listen address of the server, including IP address, port and server name (virtual hostname)
Add the backend Weblogic servers in the server pool.Requests will be load balanced between these instances on a round-robin algorithm, or based on request count.
Confirm the nodes where this new configuration should be deployed to.
Finally, review the configuration and confirm it by clicking “Create Configuration”
Once created, you can access the configuration’s menu in the left side of the administration screen, by choosing it from the “Configurations” dropdown. Select “Instances”, then go to the middle section of the page and Start the administration instance.
The applications deployed on the Weblogic servers will now be accessible via http://localhost:8080
Please feel free to leave questions or comments in the section below.