Siebel Enterprise Application Architecture - Gateway Server Best

Siebel Enterprise Application Architecture – Gateway Server Best Practices

The following summarises a number of recommendations and best practices relating specifically to the Siebel Gateway server, including both the Name Server and Resonate Central Dispatch.

High Availability
Employ a high-availability solution for the Name server to provide a failover in the event this component fails. Make use of hardware clustering to ensure the Name server is always available. This is especially important for non-load balanced components such as Siebel Assignment Manager and Siebel Remote. Environments that do not place critical business need on non-load balanced components may not require a highly available Name server.

Backup
Ensure that the Name server files are part of the regular system back strategy. The key files are stored in the “admin” directory in the Name server installation. Also ensure that the entire Gateway server setup is secured to backup once configuration is completed and every time there are revisions. This includes revisions to Central Dispatch scheduling rules.

Schedulers
Once the Siebel Name server component has been included in a high availability cluster, the Resonate Central Dispatch schedulers must be installed onto different machines. These physical servers can also be Siebel application servers although this is not recommended where concurrent user populations will exceed 1,000.

Where deployments of Siebel eBusiness will be supporting more than 1,000 concurrent users, it is recommended to use a dedicated Central Dispatch primary scheduler. Additionally, it is a good idea to use a dedicated machine for the secondary scheduler so that dispatching performance does not degrade in the event of a failure.

Scheduling Rules
Resonate Central Dispatch is supplied with a preconfigured set of simple scheduling rules. These can be adjusted according to specific customer requirements, but this must be done in a careful and controlled manner. Always preserve the supplied scheduling rules in order to facilitate an easy recovery should an error be made. Adjust the scheduling rules carefully and in a controlled and orderly fashion, making small incremental adjustments. Customers have found that installing a Windows based Resonate client allows them to make easier adjustment of the scheduling rules for UNIX based servers.

Benchmark Testing
Deployments of many thousands of users, either concurrent or in total should be benchmark tested to ensure the hardware resources for the scheduler service is adequate. Experience to date has shown that Resonate Central Dispatch is relatively light weight in comparison to other server components, however this should not be take to be a performance guarantee.
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