IBM Campaign web application clustering

Overview

The Campaign web application server components support load balancing when the web application is deployed in a clustered environment.

In Campaign, certain objects, such as offers, are cached in the web application server to improve response times in the user interface. In a load balanced environment, offers created on one web application server are available to users whose sessions connect through another server if you have configured campaign_ehcache.xml.

The objects that are cached include: offers, offer templates and attributes, campaigns, sessions, folders, attributes, initiatives, and segments.

A clustered configuration can be used to minimize disruptions in application availability in the event of a web application server failure. Because the Campaign system tables are stored in an external database, it is not necessary to replicate data to the standby server. If the primary web application server fails, the Campaign web application must be started on the standby server. When started, the Campaign web application retrieves all current data from the Campaign system table database.

Main steps

To install IBM Campaign in a clustered web application environment, follow the instructions from chapters 2 through 8 and supplement those instructions with information from this chapter.

When you install IBM Campaign in a cluster, there are many ways to configure the installation. The following steps describe the basic process:

1. Run the installers on one system, typically, the administration server or whatever the equivalent is for your application server type.
2. Create and share a file directory to hold the upload files for all of the IBM Campaign installations.
3. Create the EAR or WAR file and deploy it on each server in the cluster.
4. Configure each system to share the IBM Marketing Platform system tables and the IBM Campaign system tables.
5. Configure each system to use the shared file directory.
6. Determine which server in the cluster will send notifications. Then, suppress the notification process on all of the other servers.
7. Configure campaign_ehcache.xml for distributed caching of templates and offer folders, as explained in the IBM Campaign Installation Guide.. To specify how often the cache is refreshed, you can adjust the Campaign cache configuration settings, such as offerTemplateDataTTLSeconds. However, this adjustment can adversely affect performance because smaller values result in more frequent cache updates. Configuration settings are described in the IBM Campaign Administrator's Guide.