WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0.0.2 or later

Single-instance versus multi-instance environments

Prior to in Fix Pack 2, WebSphere Commerce already supported single instance Oracle environments. With Fix Pack 2, WebSphere Commerce adds support for multiple instance Oracle environments.

WebSphere Commerce and single instance Oracle environments

A single instance WebSphere Commerce production environment includes two systems:

The production system mainly provides the services to the internet users, or shoppers.
The authoring system mainly provides the services to the intranet users, such as the administrators and business users.

The following diagram illustrates a high-level overview of WebSphere Commerce and a single instance Oracle environment.

In a production system, there are the following:

runtime functions running as a J2EE application on top of WebSphere Application Server
command line utilities, for example, dbclean, running as J2SE applications

The runtime J2EE functions use data source pooling to connect to the database. Since most of the runtime transactions are short and dynamic, they are the most beneficial from a workload balancing and failover perspective. The command line utilities are long running, single connection applications that use the JDBC driver manager to make database connections. The RAC workload balancing and failover functions probably will not bring much benefit to them.

The authoring system has a similar configuration to the production system. In addition, the authoring utilities, such as stagingprop and stagingcopy, need to connect to both production databases. These utilities are long running applications that use the JDBC driver manager to make database connections. They probably do not require much workload balancing and failover. Furthermore, the Workspace QuickPublish function in the authoring system uses both the distributed transaction and the XAdata source connect pool to connect to production database, and use the non-XA datasource to connect to authoring database. Special settings are needed in the XADatasource for QuickPublish if the QuickPublish and workspace is needed.

WebSphere Commerce and multi-instance Oracle environments

WebSphere Commerce, as a J2EE application, can be configured in different ways to work with Oracle RAC. For instance, you could choose to use Oracle implicit connection cache or WebSphere Application Server data source connection pooling. We recommend you use Oracle single client access name (SCAN) to connect to Oracle RAC.

The following diagram illustrates a high-level overview of WebSphere Commerce and a multi-instance Oracle environment.

In production RAC cluster server-side, multiple instances (RAC1, RAC2,… RACn) can be created, and at least one Oracle service needs to be created, for example, oracleservice.

In authoring RAC cluster server-side, multiple instances (RAC1, RAC2,… RACn) can be created, and at least one Oracle service needs to be created, for example, oracleservice.