Creating the Oracle Traffic Director Domain using WLST

This is a continuation of Oracle Fusion learnings, out the list OTD, In the previous post we had Oracle Traffic Director installation was discussed. In front end technologies of Oracle come with a great set of the stack after Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c, one of them is Oracle Traffic Director. Here in this post would like to discuss how we can automate the process of OTD domain creation. Oracle came up with this tool when the market is occupied with CISCO and BIGIP load balancer, which are expensive and when you take the whole stack then you will be get benefited in license cost.

OTD main functionality is to  load balancing the HTTP requests can be handled with different balancing strategies such as :

1. Active- Active
2. Active-Passive

Prerequisites for OTD Domain

There must be at least two similar sites which can be routed with OHS or any proxy webservers. Each proxy or WebGate pointing to a WebLogic based domain it could be SOA domain as well. Example ohs1 pointing to SOA_prod_domain, ohs2 is going to refer SOA_DR_domain.
First, we will need to install the Oracle Traffic Director using the below link
Oracle Traffic Director installation in command mode
Once the installation is complete

Configuring Standalone OTD domain

The configuration of OTD Domain is very simple it is almost a single line command in WLST. To do this follow these steps:

1.  Launch the WLST command shell

   $ORACLE_HOME/oracle_common/common/bin/wlst.sh
   

   It will launch WLST shell for you which is capable of running OTD related MBeans available in it.
2. Run the following command to create the Oracle Traffic Director instance.
3. First create the properties variable which is required to configure OTD Domain, For more convenient way you can create a file and you can modify it for Test, Pre-Production, Production environments.

   props = {'domain-home': '/home/oracle/wls_domains/domains/otd_domain', 'origin-server': '192.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxx,192.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxx ','listener-port': '20009', 'instance': 'OTD1', 'server-name': '192.xxx.xxx.xxx'}
   
   otd_createStandaloneInstance(props)
   
   

Oracle Traffic Director Domain configuration using WLST

How to start the OTD Instance?

1. Run the command to start the Oracle Traffic Director standalone instance: 

2. cd /home/oracle/wls_domains/domains/otd_domain/config/fmwconfig/components/OTD/instances/OTD1/bin
   ./startserv
   

Session Stickiness at various levels

The most important thing you need to notify that Oracle Traffic Director does not maintain session stickiness. This Sessions stickiness is standard functionality. So OTD will route to the same back-end WLS server that serviced the original request by default. If the original serving server goes down it will try the route to another server from the servers pool. The session stickiness you could achieve from

Understanding OHS Level. Regarding OHS stickiness

OHS manages sticky session by default (initially through round-robin) if a cluster is targeted - in OHS WLCookieName param let redefine the name of the Session ID if needed - Session replication can be disabled from weblogic.xml in the web app - If session replication is not required, it is recommended to not create a WLS cluster in order to avoid useless multicast traffic as well as turn off session replication automatically

You might also be interested to view OHS related posts:

• OHS 12.2.1 Silent installation
• Uninstall OHS 12c
• Configuring OHS 12c domain
• OHS 12c instance Start/Stop
• Oracle Traffic Director 12.2.1 Silent Installation