Load Balancing
A load balance system (additional licence necessary) consists of at least one Node Controller and one Working Node. The number of Working Nodes is unlimited. It makes sense to install the Node Controller in a High Availability Environment, but it is not necessary. Even if it is not necessary to have a homogeneous operating system environment, it is recommended to run the Working Nodes on the same operating system the Node Controller is running on. It is also recommended to use Unix/Linux operating systems, although it is not required. Note: If in the following we do not explicitly use the term "Node Controller" or "Working Node" but "Node", then both can be meant.
Important note: Make sure that the message port of the MessageService (default is 8020) is open on all participating systems, i.e. adjust your firewalls and/or virus scanners. If the failover concept is activated, usually another port has to be open (see there).
General remarks
The Node Controller receives the data of all Input Agents and delegates the resulting jobs to the active Working Nodes. The only exceptions are all HTTP based Input Agents (e.g. web service) since they are built on a request-response model.
You can only log in to a Node Controller with the GUI. The entire activities of all the installations (Node Controller and Working Nodes) are collectively displayed in the Control Center. All the active Working Nodes are notified and synchronised with modifications on profiles (including the creation of profiles). Since all the instances use the same database, subsequently started nodes will load the latest profiles from the database and therefore be automatically synchronised.
Unless there is a different configuration (e.g. routes), the execution of jobs resulting from a profile chain will remain with the active Working Node that has been assigned with the initial job. This reduces the network load and allows for a faster conversion of the data since the overhead of the distribution logic is avoided. Note: Alternatively, the message in the Response of a chained profile can be set to context DataWizard and queue LoadBalanceTask. This will force the message to be sent to the Node Controller, from where it will be distributed. Make sure not to set the IP 0.0.0.0 in the configuration file message.xml (Node Controller and Working Node)!