Portal not recognizing cluster

Hello. We are running Portal 8.1 on WebSphere 6.1. We have a vertical cluster set up on WebSphere (two JVMs on a single host) for our Portal delivery environment. I can see that the Portal application is installed on both JVMs, but the Cluster Information page in the Portal Server Console shows only one server, and the Welcome Page indicates Portal is not clustered.

I looked through the Installation Guide, but can't find instructions for this situation. How can I get Portal to recognize the cluster?

Thanks,

Dexter

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Comments

Evan_Bench

This may be expected since in a vertical cluster portal is installed once and deployed multiple times to each node in the vertical cluster. So, portal only sees one "instance" of portal. However, you should see all the vertically clustered nodes from the WebSphere Deployment Manager node.

Can you access the portal console directly from both nodes? If so, then the cluster should work but you'll need to configure your proxy web app or load balancer with the IP addresses and port numbers of each node.

Also check that WebSphere deployment manager is configured and that each WAS jvm has the portal custom properties correctly configured (HttpSessionCloneId, unique ports, etc).

I am checking my config here to see if it shows vertically clustered jvms...

Dexter_Ellingson

Thanks for the reply. The cluster does seem to be working and looks ok from a WAS perspective. I am guessing Portal just doesn't display vertical clusters. I can access the portal console from both nodes and both show the same serial number.

Evan_Bench

I've not confirmed with anyone in Engineering but my own clustered config does not show its members in the Portal Server Console when they are vertical deployed. But, the cluster still works fine during failover and for load-balancing. Given that there is one install of portal but multiple deployed wars I can see why the Server Console might show just one node (since Portal is not "aware" of the other deployed wars in the vertical jvms').

Tomas_Briceno_Fernandez

Hi,

If I remember properly from a not-so-recent investigation, the number of cluster nodes shown in the console is computed according to the number of different serial numbers found in the metastore. A new serial number is generated everytime a different box is detected to be connecting to the Portal DB. The detection of the box identity is based on network properties, therefore, new serial ids are generated only upon the addition of new horizontal cluster nodes or when one of the existing boxes changes IP.

AFAIK, this information is actually irrelevant for actual Portal clustering features, which are based on deployment ids. New deployment ids are generated every time the Portal application is deployed. Every vertical cluster node will have a different deployment id.

Cheers,

Tomás