Highly Available Deployments for

Oracle Application Server Infrastructure services:

1.- Oracle Application Server provides two "out of the box" HA solutions (they are set up at installation time) for the Oracle Application Server Infrastructure services: one implements an active/passive model (Oracle Application Server Cold Failover Cluster) and the other implements an active/active model (Oracle Application Server Active Failover Clusters).

• Oracle Application Server Cold Failover Cluster uses a cluster ware for setting the infrastructure services in an HA configuration where one node is active and the other is in 'standby"
• Oracle Application Server Active Failover Cluster lays down an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) database in two nodes and requires a hardware load balancer to send requests to the processes that are part of the infrastructure and are external to the database.

They are both certified/supported as described in the certification matrix that you can find on otn. These two installations (CFC and AFC) use a 9.0.1.5 database version for the infrastructure. They are described/documented in detail Oracle Application Server High Availability Guide (html format and pdf format) and in the specific platform release notes

2.- Oracle also certifies other HA topologies that require manual/post-installation steps but that have additional added values such as:

a.- Superior scalability

b.- Separation of the metadata and identity management environments

c.- They allow using a different database version from the one that the installer sets up.

These topologies are:

• Rack-Mounted or Multi-box Identity Management (this solutions uses repCa to seed a pre-existing RAC database and multiple IM installations pointing to that RAC metadata repossitory)
• Cold Failover Cluster Identity Management (this solution includes the use of Oracle Respository Creation Assitant to seed an already existing Database Cold Failover Cluster)

Aditionally, all these 4 topologies (OracleAS CFC, OracleAS AFC, Multi-box IM and CFC IM) allow the split of the Identity managment subcomponets (SSO/DAS and OID) in different tiers as described in the Distributed Identiy Management whitepaper on OTN.

3.- Finally, Oracle provides a Disaster Recovery policy based on Dataguard (for infrastructure database) and Backup and Restore (for midtier components) as described in the documentation library

You can use the following flow charts to choose the architecture that best fulfills your needs:

Out-out-the-box installs

repCa based Installs