Configuring a GMS Service for ORS Load Balancing

Supported Load Balancing Features

Genesys Mobile Services (GMS) supports the following load balancing features:

• Ability to configure a list of service URLs to access a given list of nodes.
• Linear hunt strategy where requests are always delivered to the first available node in the list.
• Circular hunt strategy where requests are delivered in a round-robin fashion to the list of nodes/URLs.
• Ability to configure a linear hunt strategy or a circular hunt strategy in the service configuration. The default hunt mode is circular.

Configuration Options

If you configured a service for a GMS application, you can activate load balancing by adding an _ors option, which is used to set up a list of Orchestration Servers associated with the service.

Important

Your service must be of type ors.

For each service, you can also specify a load balancing strategy in the _ors_lb_strategy option. This ensures the possibility to define as many load balancing strategies as services with a distinct list of Orchestration Servers.

If you define an application cluster for your GMS applications, and if you define your load balancing properties for your service in this cluster application, these service options apply to all of the GMS nodes. If you modify these service options in one of the GMS nodes, the new options apply to this given node and cluster options are superseded in this node. This lets you define common service options for your cluster, with the possibility to fine-tune the service options in one or more GMS nodes.

The following table shows an example for the section service.my-office-hours service.

Option Name	Option Value
_name	The name of the service; for example, my-office-hour
_service	The service name; for example, office-hours.
_type	ors
_ors	http://hostname1:port,http://hostname2:port,http://hostname3:port
_ors_lb_strategy	circular (default) or linear

In a circular ORS load balancing strategy, the max_ors_request_attempts option provides you with the ability to select the next ORS Server in the list of ORS Servers defined for the service when the request to the first ORS fails. For example, if you set the value of max_ors_request_attempts to 1, the first ORS Server in the list will be used only one time, and in case of ORS failure, the request will fail. If you set the value to 3, the first ORS Server in the the list will be used and if the request fails, the next ORS Server in the list will be used, and so on, until the third server. After the third server fails to respond, the request returns a failure.

A linear ORS load balancing strategy follows the same process with the max_ors_request_attempts option for retry on failure.

Note: The max_ors_request_attempts option is in the ors section; the default value is 3 (three attempts before failure); the value must be greater than 0.

Setting up Load Balancing Configuration

Purpose
To set up ORS load balancing for a given GMS service.

Prerequisites

• You defined a service for your GMS application by using the Service Management User Interface, for example, a service of name office-hours.
• You installed and configured Orchestration Servers.

Start

• In the Service Management User Interface > Services > Configured Services > <your service name>:
  1. Click Add Settings.
  2. Enter _ors for the Name, and then enter the list of URLs, separated with commas, for the Value.
  3. (Optional) Click Add Settings again. Enter _ors_lb_strategy for the Name, and then enter circular or linear for the Value. If not specified, the default _ors_lb_strategy value is circular.
• In Configuration Manager:
  1. Open your application and select the Options tab. Edit your service.<service_name> section.
  2. Click Create New Section/Option.
  3. Enter _ors for the Option Name, and then enter the list of URLs, separated with commas, for the Option Value. Click OK.
  4. (Optional) Click Create New Section/Option again. Enter _ors_lb_strategy for the Name, and then enter circular or linear for the Value. If not specified, the default _ors_lb_strategy value is circular.

Stop