Understanding Single-Tier and Multi-Tier Installations

In a single-tier WebFOCUS installation, you would most typically have:

• One machine running your web server, WebFOCUS Reporting Server, and WebFOCUS Client. The PMF application footprint is installed on this machine.
• Any number of browser users, with scalability to number of users provisioned by adding processors to the WebFOCUS server.
• One or more RDBMS resources.

In this type of environment, you would have PMF installed once on the Reporting Server, web server, or client machine, to support all your users. You would also need to host the PMF data mart on one of your RDBMS servers. PMF supports hosting on MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, PostGre SQL, Information Builders HyperStage, or IBM DB2.

The following image is an example of a typical single-tier installation.

In a multi-tier WebFOCUS installation, you would most typically have:

• One or more machines running your web server and WebFOCUS Client. The PMF application footprint is installed on each machine.
• One or more RDBMS resources.
• One or more machines running your WebFOCUS Reporting Server, with the RDBMS connections defined. The PMF application footprint is also installed on this machine.
• Any number of browser users, with scalability to number of users provisioned by adding machines to the server farms and/or adding processor capacity to the machines.

In this type of environment, you would have PMF installed multiple times:

• Once for each WebFOCUS Reporting Server.
• Once for each web server or client machine designed to serve your PMF stakeholders.

You would also need to host the PMF data mart on one of your RDBMS servers, most typically Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, or PostGre SQL.

The following image is an example of a typical multi-tier installation.

Additional considerations introduced in this type of installation are if you are using web server farms with multiple web servers and WebFOCUS Clients. Some PMF run-time components create local data to be reused by browser users. For example, some of the WebFOCUS chart procedures shipped with PMF create local captured graphics in storage on the web server or WebFOCUS Client tier. Since a connection to PMF is non-persistent across the WebFOCUS environment, a logged-in user might be passed off to multiple web servers during a single session. You will need to define shared storage across the web servers, so these items will be available in the same location across all web servers.