MicroStrategy Interview Questions Part 8

MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 7.x Clustering FAQ

GENERAL OVERVIEW

Does MicroStrategy 7.0 provide its own clustering strategy?

Yes. MicroStrategy 7.0 provides clustering at the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server level allowing users, connected through 4-tier mode, to access MicroStrategy Intelligence Server cluster.

What is the current clustering architecture of MicroStrategy 7.0?

The clustering architecture can be described as follows:

1. MicroStrategy Web users send requests from their web browsers.

2. A third party IP redistribution tool such as Cisco Local Router or Microsoft Windows Load Balancing Service is used to distribute requests coming from web clients among web servers.

3. Based on the load on each MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, the load balancers distribute the requests among the MicroStrategy Intelligence Servers. Each MicroStrategy Intelligence Server collects information about its own load and gives this information to the load balancer requesting this information. MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 7.0, 7.0 SP1 and 7.0 SP2 calculate load as being the number of user connections connected to the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server. When a new user connects to a MicroStrategy Web server, MicroStrategy Web opens a new user connection to the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server with the lightest load. All requests by that user will be routed to the same MicroStrategy Intelligence Server until the user is disconnected by MicroStrategy Web.

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After users are connected to a MicroStrategy Intelligencer Server node, the node may crash, causing users to be disconnected. If the users are not running any requests when the failure occurs, then MicroStrategy Web will automatically create a new connection to an available cluster node the next time the users submit a request. If the users are running a report request during the node failure, the report request will result in an error. MicroStrategy Web 7.0, 7.0 SP1 and 7.0 SP2 will trap this error and return a message to inform the users of the error in the report and asking them whether or not they would like to resubmit the report. If the users decide to resubmit the report, MicroStrategy Web will open a new connection to an available MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, with the same login credentials originally supplied by the users. Autoprompts will have to be re-answered during this report resubmission. MicroStrategy Web can be customized so that when an Intelligence Server goes down and a user is disconnected, resulting errors will be trapped and reports will be resubmitted without the end user knowing.

4. The MicroStrategy Intelligence Servers receive the requests and process them. In addition, the MicroStrategy Intelligence Servers communicate with each other to maintain metadata integrity and report cache synchronization across the system. Any report caches created by one MicroStrategy Intelligence Server node are accessible by any other MicroStrategy Intelligence Server node in the cluster.

5. The MicroStrategy Intelligence Servers send queries to the databases as usual.

When is clustering recommended?

Clustering is recommended in any mission-critical application in which permanent availability and system performance is of utmost importance. Availability is provided by failover support and performance improvements are provided by load balancing of job requests.