With this blog I want to create a short guide describing how to configure a Federated Portal Network (FPN) connection between two portals by using a Load Balancer. It's not difficult at all but maybe this guide can help you to avoid pesky documentation reviewing.

For load balancing you can use a multitude of hardware or software products but in this blog I want to concentrate on the SAP Web Dispatcher and SAP Message Server.

As described in the SAP help library the workflow to create a FPN scenario is to configure the user repository, configure the proxy settings, set up trust, define initial caching configuration, define initial consumer profile settings and set the user permissions and UME actions to the local portal roles.

The next step is to add the producer portal on the consumer portal which is the interesting part for us.

In the consumer portal, we navigate to System Administration > Federated Portal > Myself as Content Consumer > Manage My Producers.
In the Portal Catalog, right-click (or any of its subfolders), and then from the context menu, we choose New > NetWeaver Content Producer. The Producer Wizard is launched.

In the first step we enter the general properties of the FPN connection like: 

We click on Next to get to Step 2 where we define the producer URL. In case we would like to create a simple FPN connection without load balancing we now enter the host name (please always in FQDN) and http port of the producer portal. If we like to use Remote Delta Links (RDL) we have to configure also the P4 communication. We do this by selecting "Connection String or Single Server" for the P4 Connection, enter the producer host name again and the P4 port.

Caution:

Caution: The P4 port is not always the http port +4. Server administrators can change this parameter. To get the P4 port the SAP documentation refers to the P4 Provider service which we can access via the Visual Admin. An alternative and maybe nicer way to find the P4 port is to have a look at the System Information via http://<host>:<port>/monitoring/SystemInfo. There are all ports listed.

However, today we are not interested to configure a simple direct communication between consumer and producer portal but a load balanced communication. So if you want to use the SAP Web Dispatcher or a non-SAP load balancer you should enter the URL of the load balancer in the Host Name and the appropriate port number.  However, the SAP Web Dispatcher is not able to load balance the P4 communication. That means with the SAP Web Dispatcher it is not possible to load balance RDLs. If you want to use a non-SAP load balancer you should at first check if it supports the P4-RMI protocol.

Let's assume the product support of our non-SAP Load Balancer told us that our load balancer doesn't support P4 redirection. So we have to fall back on the SAP Message Server. Okay, but how to obtain host name and port information of a SAP Message Server?

Don't worry. Do the following:

Use the Visual Admin tool to access the property sheet of the Message Info service Maybe this service is not yet running. To start the service you just choose the service and then start the service with the ‘Runner' icon on the toolbar.

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Now you can open the Runtime tab > Parameters tab. The host name and port are listed in the sever host and ms/http_port parameters, respectively.

Back to the portal we now have to define the Producer URL. By using the Message Server we should obviously use "Load-balanced via Message Server" in the P4 Communication Host Name

 

Afterwards we can finish the Wizard, maintain the Producer Alias and test the connection.

The last point that I want to mention is the producer registration.
FYI: The registration doesn't really check the entered data, so although our maintained data may be incorrect the registration generally succeeds. You will notice problems then at runtime when your portal attempts to retrieve and display remote content from the producer portal.

We open the producer registration of our newly created producer portal in the consumer portal and enter the data of the consumer portal, resp. the SAP Web Dispatcher of the consumer portal, resp. SAP Message server of the consumer portal or a non-SAP load balancer.

As already discussed for the P4 communication we shouldn't use the SAP Web Dispatcher but a direct connection to the consumer portal or the Message Server of the consumer portal.

Well - That's it from my side. There are still some FPN configuration steps missing but those aren't load balance specific and you can refer to the SAP help library. 

I hope I could resolve some doubts with this blog.