Sizing Hardware and Services For Deployment

In an online system this could be a severe problem, interrupting all access to protected resources. Most deployments fall into this category.

In an embedded system protecting local resources, it might be acceptable to restart the service.

Deployments that require always-on service availability require some sort of load balancing solution at minimum between AM and AM client applications. The load balancer itself must be redundant, too, so that it does not become a single point of failure. Illustrations in Example Deployment Topology, show multiple levels of load balancing for availability and firewalls for security.

AM allows you to deploy replicated configurations in different physical locations, so that if the service experiences complete failure at one site, you can redirect client traffic to another site and continue operation. The question is whether the benefit in reducing the likelihood of failure outweighs the costs of maintaining multiple sites.

When you need failover across sites, one of the costs is (redundant) WAN links scaled for inter-site traffic. AM synchronizes configuration and policy data across sites, and by default also synchronizes session data as well. AM also expects profiles in identity stores to remain in sync. As shown in Example Deployment Topology, the deployment involves directory service replication between sites.

AM offers different ways of storing session information to suit your environment needs. If your environment requires session high availability, AM can store sessions in the CTS token store. Even if a server fails or the client browser crashes, the session remains available as long as the CTS is available.

In deployments where an interruption in access to a protected resource could cause users to lose valuable information, configuring the CTS correctly can prevent the loss. The underlying directory service should replicate sessions stored in CTS. Because session information can be quite volatile—more volatile than configuration and policy data—replication of the CTS across sites can therefore call for more WAN bandwidth, as more information is shared across sites.

To answer these questions, you can measure the current disk space and memory occupied by the configuration directory data. Next, create a representative sample of the policies that you expect to see in the deployment, and measure the difference. Then, derive the average policy size, and use it to estimate total size.

To measure rates of policy evaluations, you can monitor policy evaluation counts over SNMP. For details, see "SNMP Monitoring for Policy Evaluation".

The average total size depends on the number of live CTS entries, which in turn depends on session and token lifetimes. The lifetimes are configurable and depend also on user actions like logout, that are specific to the deployment.

For example, suppose that the deployment only handles CTS-based SSO sessions, session entries occupy on average 20 KB of memory, and that you anticipate on average 100,000 active sessions. In that case, you would estimate the need for 2 GB (100,000 x 20,000) RAM on average if you wanted to cache all the session data in memory. If you expect that sometimes the number of active sessions could rise to 200,000, then you would plan for 4 GB RAM for the session cache. Keep in mind that this is extra memory needed in addition to memory needed for everything else that the system does including running AM server.

Session data is relatively volatile, as the CTS creates session entries when sessions are created. CTS deletes session entries when sessions are destroyed due to logout or timeout. Sessions are also modified regularly to update the idle timeout. Suppose the rate of session creation is about 5 per second, and the rate of session destruction is also about 5 per second. Then you know that the underlying directory service must handle on average 5 adds and 5 deletes per second. The added entries generate on the order of 100 KB replication traffic per second (5/s x 20 KB plus some overhead). The deleted entries generate less replication traffic, as the directory service only needs to know the distinguished name (DN) of the entry to delete, not its content.

You can also gather statistics about CTS operations over using AM monitoring services. For more information, see Monitoring Instances.

When sizing the network, you must account for change notifications from the Core Token Server token store to the AM server.

In AM deployments, there is no direct network traffic between AM servers.

AM stores data in user profile attributes. AM can use or provision many profile attributes, as described in "To Configure an Identity Store".

When you know which attributes are used, you can estimate the average increase in size by measuring the identity store as you did for configuration and CTS-related data. If you do not manage the identity store as part of the deployment, you can communicate this information with the maintainers. For a large deployment, the increase in profile size can affect sizing for the underlying directory service.

In a centrally managed deployment with only a few realms, the size of realm configuration data might not be consequential. Also, you might have already estimated the size of policy data. For example, each new realm might add about 1 MB of configuration data to the configuration directory, not counting the policies added to the realm.

In a multi-tenant deployment or any deployment where you expect to set up many new realms, the realm configuration data and the additional policies for the realm can add significantly to the size of the configuration data overall. You can measure the configuration directory data as you did previously, but specifically for realm creation and policy configuration, so that you can estimate an average for a new realm with policies and the overall size of realm configuration data for the deployment.