This document describes how to configure ZXTM to manage a cluster of Oracle Application servers. We will discuss load balancing the cluster members for reliability, offloading SSL connections to ZXTM for speed and efficiency, using ZXTM to manage session persistence and securing the Oracle Enterprise Manager administration tool.

Oracle clustering supports two high availability topologies. They are “Active – Active” and “Active – Passive”. This guide will address the more scalable configuration of the “Active – Active” topology.

In the “Active – Active” scenario all Oracle cluster members are load balanced by ZXTM and will therefore require some session management. If your application does not make use of Oracle session replication, ZXTM can manage this for you using session persistence classes. The benefits of using ZXTM this way can be in speed and efficiency, because the application server does not need to replicate any state information. However a node failure will result in the loss of all sessions persisted to the node that failed.

In an “Active – Passive” scenario ZXTM will send all traffic to the active node and only fail over to the passive node when the active node fails. In this configuration Oracle recommend you use some form of shared storage which is mounted on the active node. You therefore need to have some way of remounting the shared storage on to the other node when a failure occurs. Please read the Oracle Application Server High Availability guide for more information on “Active – Passive” topologies.

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