Architecture for Disco installation question

Question

Scene setting:
10 centrally managed sites want a discoverer solution. sites access to applications managed via rules on firewall which restrict access via an IP range comig from a site.
I want to run a nightly database refresh to a reporting database. the database can be single instance with 10 schemas or 10 instances with single schema.
On front end, I install discoverer and point it at the reporting database(s).
Question
what options do I have for installing discoverer?
I can have multiple installs, is there a problem with this on one server?
Or preferably have 1 install and point at
a) multiple databases instances, or
b)multiple schemas on 1 instance
from a sinlge disco install can I present out multiple URLs, example, http://discoverer/site<#>, where URL to site<#> is tied on firewall and site<#> is also a business area in discoverer.

Answer 1

Hi
In chapter 20 of my Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook, available on amazon, I cover configuring Discoverer. Pages 803 to 808 specifically cover managing Discoverer for high availability, which essentially means load balancing. Here is the first paragraph from that section:
Two fundamental advantages exist to having multiple Discoverer middle tiers. One is high availability, ; the other is load balancing. If your organization does not have a hardware load balancer, you can configure Oracle Web Cache to perform the load balancing for you. The fundamental challenge to load balancing Discoverer is that each user must stay connected to the same Discoverer server for their entire session. Fortunately, Oracle Web Cache has a feature called session binding that will guarantee this. If you are going to use a hardware load balancer, this is known as “sticky-bit” configuration.
There is plenty of documentation on OTN for Discoverer, http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/appserver1012.html, documentation that in the configuration guide covers the setting up of load balancing. So you can either download Oracle's excellent guide or you can look in my book.
As for being able to present multiple URLs out of the same Discoverer server it depends what you are trying to do.
If you're trying to limit what users can see then you might want to consider using a VPD to control what users can access.
Or are you saying that you want to make different EULs available to the users? In this case you can add a switch to the URL that will prefill the EUL section of the log in form. For example, if you have an EUL called SALES you can do this:
http://<machine.domain>:<port>/discoverer/plus?&eul=SALES
Other setting you can make could be the userid and / or the database, like this:
http://<machine.domain>:<port>/discoverer/plus?us=michael&database=salesoffice&eul=SALES
Does this help?
Best wishes
Michael