Benefits of Clustering

Clustering Intelligence Servers provides the following benefits:

Increased resource availability: If one Intelligence Server in a cluster fails, the other Intelligence Servers in the cluster can pick up the workload. This prevents the loss of valuable time and information if a server fails.
Strategic resource usage: You can distribute projects across nodes in whatever configuration you prefer. This reduces overhead because not all machines need to be running all projects, and allows you to use your resources flexibly.
Increased performance: Multiple machines provide greater processing power.
Greater scalability: As your user base grows and report complexity increases, your resources can grow.
Simplified management: Clustering simplifies the management of large or rapidly growing systems.

Failover Support

Failover support ensures that a business intelligence system remains available for use if an application or hardware failure occurs. Clustering provides failover support in two ways:

Load redistribution: When a node fails, the work for which it is responsible is directed to another node or set of nodes.
Request recovery: When a node fails, the system attempts to reconnect MicroStrategy Web users with queued or processing requests to another node. Users must log in again to be authenticated on the new node. The user is prompted to resubmit job requests.

Load Balancing

Load balancing is a strategy aimed at achieving even distribution of user sessions across Intelligence Servers, so that no single machine is overwhelmed. This strategy is especially valuable when it is difficult to predict the number of requests a server will receive. MicroStrategy achieves four-tier load balancing by incorporating load balancers into the MicroStrategy Web and Web products.

Load is calculated as the number of user sessions connected to a node. The load balancers collect information on the number of user sessions each node is carrying. Using this information at the time a user logs in to a project, MicroStrategy Web connects them to the Intelligence Server node that is carrying the lightest session load. All requests by that user are routed to the node to which they are connected until the user disconnects from the MicroStrategy Web product.

Project Distribution and Project Failover

When you set up several server machines in a cluster, you can distribute projects across those clustered machines or nodes in any configuration, in both Windows and Linux environments. All servers in a cluster do not need to be running all projects. Each node in the cluster can host a different set of projects, which means only a subset of projects need to be loaded on a specific Intelligence Server machine. This feature provides you with flexibility in using your resources, and it provides better scalability and performance because of less overhead on each Intelligence Server machine.

Distributing projects across nodes also provides project failover support. For example, one server is hosting project A and another server is hosting projects B and C. If the first server fails, the other server can host all three projects to ensure project availability.

Project creation, duplication, and deletion in a three-tier, or server, connection are automatically broadcast to all nodes during runtime to ensure synchronization across the cluster.

Work Fencing

User fences and workload fences allow you to reserve nodes of a cluster for either users or a project subscriptions. For more information, see Reserve Nodes with Work Fences.