CXO-Cockpit can be scaled out to multiple servers to increase the system responsiveness and/or to implement failover scenarios. This article explains how to install the CXO-Cockpit on multiple servers.
Load balancing for the CXO-Cockpit Web Application
CXO-Cockpit web application can be installed on several servers. There should be a load balancer provided by the destination infrastructure that passes the HTTP(s) requests from the clients through to one of the available CXO-Cockpit servers. The only requirement to the load balancer is that it must implement "sticky sessions" scenario: all subsequent requests from a certain client must end up to the same CXO-Cockpit server as the first request from that client. The most typical implementation of this scenario is "Cookie-based Persistence". In this scenario the load balancer appends a cookie to the first client's request that cookie is used later on to identify the server all the subsequent requests should be forwarded to.
Scalability of other components and the deployment strategy
CXO-Cockpit is delivered as an IIS web application and a couple of Windows applications. The following table shows which components should be installed in the a multi-server setup.
| Type | Applicability | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web Reporting Suite | IIS Web application | Can be installed on every CXO-Cockpit server | |
| Storyboard Export Service | Windows Service | Can be installed on every CXO-Cockpit server | |
| Agent Service | Windows Service | Should be installed on one server | High Availability note: The Agent service can be installed on every CXO-Cockpit server but the service must only be enabled on one sever. On all other servers the service must be disabled. If the server that hosts the running instance of the Agent crashes, a service on another server can be enabled and started. There should not be 2 or more instances of the Agent Service running at the same time. The agent service is used for the background scenarios and not directly involved in the dashboard report generation. The system remains functional if the Agent Service is not working for a short period of time. |
| CXO-Configurator | Windows application | Should be installed on every CXO-Cockpit server | |
| CXO Source System Manager | Windows application | A client Windows-based tool, does't need to installed on the server | This tool is used to configure the connections to the external systems. In the future this windows tool will be replaced by a web-based version. It's still recommended to have this tool installed on every CXO-Cockpit server. |
Configure BackPlane database
In order for CXO-Cockpit to run properly in the load-ballanced environemnt, the BackPlane database must be created.