At a recent client we were using two web servers, both running IIS and the OBIEE presentation services, over the top of this a load balancer routed connections to one of the two servers based on load. We used the Oracle provided replication services to make sure that the contents of the two web catalogs running on each presentation server were kept in synch.
However we noticed over time that the replication services weren't working 100% and that some items were not present in both web catalogs.
To get around this we decided instead to use the ISAPI forwarding functionality; this allows the IIS server on one web server to forward it's presentation service connections to another server. This means that we can have two servers running IIS and accepting incoming connections, but only one running the presentation services, so only one web catalog is required and no replication has to take place.
In versions before the name change to OBIEE (i.e. Siebel Analytics 7.8 etc) this was handled via a registry key entry as below:
Path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Siebel Systems, Inc.\Siebel Analytics\Web\7.8\ISAPI\
String value:
Name = ServerConnectString
Value = sawtcp://[server name]:9710
In OBIEE this has been replaced with a setting in the configuration file:
[Oracle BI Directory]\web\config\isapiconfig.xml
Like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WebConfig>
<ServerInstance>
<ServerConnectInfo address="localhost" port="9710"/>
</ServerInstance>
</WebConfig>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WebConfig>
<ServerInstance>
<ServerConnectInfo address="localhost" port="9710"/>
</ServerInstance>
</WebConfig>
Just change localhost to the name of the server running the presentation services that you want the IIS connections to be forwarded to.
