Configuring the Web Interface › Web Director and Web Load Distribution

Web Director and Web Load Distribution

As web usage grows at your site, it can be helpful to distribute the load among multiple web engines, multiple HTTP servers, or both. Distribution lets you scale up the capacity of the web server to accommodate the level of usage demanded by your organization. You can use Web Director, provided with CA SDM, to distribute web load. Web Director receives connection requests from users, selects a web engine to handle the request, and redirects the request to that web engine. Except for the change in URL, this process is transparent to the end user, who always accesses CA SDM with the same URL, regardless of the number of web engines configured.

You can use Web Director in the following ways:

• To configure CA SDM for efficient use of secure sockets (SSL).

  The HTTPS protocol allows web transactions to be encrypted, providing maximum security for sensitive data, especially passwords. However, pages using SSL are ineligible for browser caching, which can have a negative impact on performance.

• To direct logins to a specific web engine (or web engines).

  After a user is authenticated, Web Director can move the session to a different web engine, which can be on a different HTTP server. This setup lets you configure SSL for a login web engine, providing maximum protection for your passwords while using standard HTTP protocol for other transactions, and maximizing their performance.

• To have multiple Web Directors, each handling a different group of web engines.

  This setup can be useful in geographically dispersed organizations that want to locate groups of web engines physically closer to their end users.