Lotus Domino Server Configurations

A Lotus Domino server cluster is a Domino application server-based feature and does not affect the Domino HTTP server configuration. Accessing a Lotus Domino server using HTTP triggers the Ticket Verifier. You can install the Ticket Verifier on any cluster node that runs the HTTP task.

 

ICM allows you to use Domino clusters to provide fail-over and workload balancing to HTTP clients (Internet browsers) when they access Domino Web servers.

You can run the ICM on any server that uses the Domino Release 5 Enterprise Server license. You install and configure Domino clusters as normal, and then you configure the ICM. The ICM always uses its local copy of the Domino Directory. Therefore, the ICM must be in the same Domino DNS domain as the cluster.

 

The ICM acts as an intermediary between HTTP clients and the Domino Web servers in a cluster. When Domino Web servers run in a cluster, they generate URLs that direct HTTP client requests to the ICM. When the ICM receives a client request, it redirects the client to the most available server that contains a replica of the requested database.

 

This leads to the following scenarios:

 

• If the ICM is inside the cluster, the Ticket Verifier has to be installed on the ICM and on all cluster member nodes. This is because the ICM also serves HTTP requests.
• If the ICM is outside the cluster, Ticket Verifier has to be installed on all cluster member nodes, but not on the ICM. This is because the ICM only carries out the HTTP redirecting, and is not involved in the authentication and/or serving of HTTP requests.

 

The Ticket Verifier does not affect a Domino Server Web SSO configuration, since the Ticket Verifier only handles authentication requests where an SAP logon ticket is sent using a cookie in the HTTP request. You can run the Ticket Verifier and a Domino Server Web SSO configuration on the same machine.