If you have a running
Silk Central instance and experience issues with insufficient memory that cannot be further increased, you can set up additional front-end
servers to distribute user sessions and consumed memory across multiple machines.
Note: When using load-balancing architectures, multiple front-end servers will still be used through a single NGINX proxy and will
still access the same application server and database. There is no reduction of load from that perspective.
To set up and configure additional front-end servers for load-balancing:
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If you have installed
Silk Central on a server, enable access to the application server on this server from any host:
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Stop the application server on this server.
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In the installation directory of the
Silk Central instance, navigate to the configuration file
conf\SccAppServerBootConf.xml.
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Remove the entry
<RegistryHost>127.0.0.1 </RegistryHost> and save the configuration file.
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Re-start the application server.
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Use the
Silk Central setup to install
Silk Central on all machines that you want to add as front-end servers for load-balancing.
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When setup is completed, navigate to the
Instance Administration (http://localhost:19100) on the machine.
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As you just need a front-end server, stop the application server and the chart server of the instance you want to use for
load balancing.
-
Click
to open the
Settings dialog of this instance. On the
Servers tab, select the front-end server and copy the
front-end server port.
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Switch to the machine that is used as the application server and navigate to the
Instance Administration (http://localhost:19100).
-
Click
to open the
Settings dialog of your performance lacking instance and activate the maintenance mode.
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On the file system, open the NGINX custom properties file (C:\ProgramData\SilkCentral\InstanceAdministration\nginx\conf\nginxCustom.properties) and add the URL of the front-end server on
Server B (<SERVER_NAME>:<PORT>), using the copied
front-end server port.
Notation:
frontendservers.<INSTANCE_NAME>=<FE_URL1>{,<FE_URL2>,...,<FE_URLX>}
For example:
frontendservers.silk=localhost:19110,silkserver2:19320
Attention: Because of NGINX restrictions it is not possible to use port
19120 of a front-end server. Always get the port from the settings dialog as described in step 4.
-
Go back to the
Instance Administration page and click
to open the
Settings dialog of your performance lacking instance. On the
Servers tab, select the application server and copy the
application server port.
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To establish the connection between the front-end server and the application server, open a web browser and navigate directly
to the machine that hosts the front-end server by using
http://<Server B>:<front-end server port>. Make sure you use the port from the settings dialog, not
19120!
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On the application server connection page, enter the
Host or IP-address and the copied
application server port of the machine that hosts the application server.
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Go back to the
Instance Administration page and deactivate the maintenance mode. This will update the NGINX configuration.
When your users now access the instance using the same URL as before, they are automatically balanced between the front-end
server on the initial machine, which also hosts the application server, and the new front-end server machine.