Integration

Hi,

I've got two OAS servers configured to serve up OBIEE, and want to put F5 BIG-IP on the front to load balance between the two.

Can anyone share their experience of this configuration?

Load Balancing works if the direct URL is used: http://loadbalancer.mycompany.com/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard

However, if a URL requiring OAS/Apache to redirect is used, for example, http://loadbalancer.mycompany.com/analytics/, it redirects using the Port setting in Apache (7777), eg. http://loadbalancer.mycompany.com:7777/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard. The problem with this is that the servername is still the F5 Load Balancer, and F5 won't accept connections on port 7777.

I know that Apache can be configured to redirect in a different way, by changing UseCanonicalName to On. This then creates the redirect URL with both the Port (7777) and the servername (oasserver01 or oasserver02). So http://loadbalancer.mycompany.com/analytics/ then redirects to http://oasserver02.mycompany.com:7777/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard (or oasserver01), which is a valid URL.
The problem with this is then that the user is accessing one of the web servers directly, instead of going by the load balancer. The consequence of this would be twofold:
1) if the web server failed the user would not get redirected to the other web server
2) the user might bookmark the direct web server URL, again meaning that if it failed (or we wanted to take it down for maintenance) they wouldn't get redirected to the other web server.

Should we be fixing Apache to redirect to port 80, or can F5 be configured to handle connections on 7777?

I've seen the F5/OAS deployment guide on the F5 website but our admins here are saying that it's more basic than the configuration we've got.