To help provide a highly available Windchill solution, you can configure Windchill to allow failover to an alternate LDAP directory server if the primary LDAP server fails. The failover to an alternate LDAP server can be performed transparently to Windchill users. However, this transparency is dependent on the web server being used. Apache supports an LDAP failover capability. If you are using a web server other than an Apache-based web server (such as the HTTP Server), review the web server documentation to verify that it supports LDAP failover.

This section describes the failover capability as it applies to the Windchill Directory Server, a required component of a Windchill installation. Similar configuration changes can also be used to support failover of other enterprise-level directory servers, such as Microsoft Active Directory. See Enterprise LDAP Failover.

Configuring Windchill to failover to alternate LDAP servers is a manual process that must be performed after initial installation. The initial installation process does not provide a way to configure failover.

The capability described in this section is strictly for failover in support of high availability. No load-balancing is performed. The configuration changes documented here only allow you to specify a list of LDAP servers. Failover occurs if the LDAP server being used is no longer available. Failover does not occur if the server is slow or hung. Although the failover should normally be prompt, there may be some delay in failover from one server to another. Also, possible end-user impacts can occur, depending on operations in process at the time of failover. For example, if an LDAP modification is occurring at the time of failover, it is possible the change may need to be repeated.