IFS Middleware Server is included in the mandatory sales-part and component IFS Middleware Server (FNDMWS).
Read more about IFS Middleware Server and how to deploy on IFS Middleware Server
For latest IFS Middleware Server tips and tricks include tuning and troubleshooting recordings please refer to Technology home (IFS Internal)
Note: It is recommended to have only a single
installation of IFS Middleware Server installed per machine. IFS Middle tier
functionality is only verified on single installations of
IFS Middleware Server installed per machine.
It is also
recommended to run your server in US English. It is the only OS language used
when verifying IFS Middleware Server.
It is only possible to have a single installation of IFS Middleware Server
per database instance. Scalability is achieved by clustering the Application
Server.
When installing IFS Middleware Server you need knowledge of database, such as host,
service name, appowner and passwords to the internal users.
Make sure you use Oracle dedicated servers (as opposed to Oracle
shared servers) for the Application Server database connections.
Be sure to disable any Anti Virus Protection program running on the machine in question. A running Anti Virus scan can lock files and halt the IFS Mddleware Server installation process. It is recommended to always have the Anti Virus Protection disabled on the machine.
IF Anti-Virus (active or “passive”) is required by company policy these
recommendation apply.
On the Appserver active HTTP scanning is not
allowed.These disk folders should be excluded from disk scanning.
Appserver:
Ifs_home
%TEMP% folder (used by installer)
DB:
Oracle_base
Oracle
datafile folders.
RMAN backup areas
IFS servers should be connected with a high bandwidth and low latency network, preferably placed in the same server room. Note that high latencies between database and middle tier will have a significant negative performance impact. A suitable network link between database and middle tier should be minimum 100 Mbps and less than 1 ms latency.
This should be considered in global installations. Installing storage tier in
one part of the world and middle tier in another part of the world will result
in bad
performance.
On Microsoft Windows - when setting up horizontal
middleware server cluster the node machines should be connected to a domain, the
firewall in Windows will not allow windows services to communicate the way a
cluster requires otherwise. Separate firewall rule might be required that accepts RPC Dynamic ports between the cluster nodes depending on how network principals are defined in the network domain.
Network is also subject to Security Considerations.
Although all main components of IFS Applications, including the database and the application server run on multiple platforms, a complete deployment will require at least one Windows machine. For a complete list of which parts of IFS Applications require a Windows machine, see the IFS Applications technical configuration guide (part of Supported Platforms Policy). However at least the following components require a Windows machine.
Windows Update shall be disabled on the machine and never run automatically. Updates can be handled manually or with Microsoft update servers within specific maintenance hours only.
If you are using IFS Report Designer and the IFS Print Agent to print large volumes of operational reports such as order confirmations and invoices, you might consider clustering the integration node.. This is especially true if you are also planning for a high load of web users and/or high volumes of integration messages.
The diffent nodes are typically installed on separate machines. This offloads report processing from your main nodes and assures that performance in the transaction processing is not slowed by large printing volumes. Read more in Reporting Deployment Considerations
With the high-end installation scenario an application server cluster is used. Using a cluster is a possible scale-up option where you also get some level of failover (if a node goes down, the system continues to run but with limited capacity).
Read more about cluster in IFS Middleware Server
In a highly available scenario an external load balancer is mandatory. Any load balancer can be used, as long as it supports (and has been configured to use) session affinity/sticky sessions. Without session affinity/sticky sessions (client sessions "sticking" to a particular cluster node) IFS clients will not work as expected.
Read more about load balancer with IFS Middleware Server