Understanding Domains Overview

PowerCenter has a service-oriented architecture that provides the ability to scale services and share resources across multiple machines. High availability functionality helps minimize service downtime due to unexpected failures or scheduled maintenance in the PowerCenter environment.

The PowerCenter domain is the fundamental administrative unit in PowerCenter. The domain supports the administration of the distributed services. A domain is a collection of nodes and services that you can group in folders based on administration ownership.

A node is the logical representation of a machine in a domain. One node in the domain acts as a gateway to receive service requests from clients and route them to the appropriate service and node. Services and processes run on nodes in a domain. The availability of a service or process on a node depends on how you configure the service and the node. For more information, see Nodes.

Services for the domain include the Service Manager and a set of application services:

  Service Manager. A service that manages all domain operations. It runs the application services and performs domain functions on each node in the domain. Some domain functions include authentication, authorization, and logging. For more information, see Service Manager.

  Application services. Services that represent PowerCenter server-based functionality, such as the Repository Service and the Integration Service. The application services that runs on a node depend on the way you configure the services. For more information, see Application Services.

The Service Manager and application services control PowerCenter security. The Service Manager manages users and groups that can log in to PowerCenter applications and authenticates the users who log in to PowerCenter applications. The Service Manager and application services authorize user requests from PowerCenter applications. For more information, see Security.

The PowerCenter Administration Console consolidates the administrative tasks for domain objects such as services, nodes, licenses, and grids and for users, groups, and roles. You manage the domain and the security of the domain through the Administration Console.

To use the SSL protocol to transfer data securely between the Administration Console and the Service Manager, configure HTTPS for all nodes on the domain. You can configure HTTPS when you install PowerCenter or using infasetup commands. The Administration Console uses the HTTPS port to communicate with the Service Manager. The gateway and worker node port numbers you configure for communication with the Service Manager remain the same. Application services and PowerCenter Client applications communicate with the Service Manager using the gateway or worker node port.

If you have the high availability option, you can scale services and eliminate single points of failure for services. Services can continue running despite temporary network or hardware failures.