Single-instance versus multi-instance environments

WebSphere Commerce supports single-instance and multi-instance Oracle environments.

WebSphere Commerce and single instance Oracle environments

A single instance WebSphere Commerce production environment includes two systems:

The production system, which mainly provides the services to internet users, or shoppers.
The authoring system, which mainly provides the services to 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,

Runtime functions are run as a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application on top of WebSphere Application Server.
Command line utilities, for example, dbclean, run 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 do not provide much benefit to command line utilities.

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 workspaces QuickPublish function uses both the distributed transaction and the XADataSource connect pool to connect to production database, and uses the non-XADataSource to connect to the authoring database. Special settings are needed in the XADatasource for QuickPublish if QuickPublish and workspaces are 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. It is recommended that 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.