SAP Plant Connectivity Loadbalancing/Failover

[daniel_schmitz86]

Dear all,

I am wondering how SAP Plant Connectivity should provide real loadbalancing/failover while connecting machines with SAP PCo to standard PAPI webservice calls per WSDL. In our environment we have a central web dispatcher and 3 application servers who gets the forwarded requests from client -> web dispatcher -> application server 1 / 2 / 3.

Example: We define a destination system for a universal webservice call to a standard PAPI webservice URI, for example SfcStateService. We choose type "WSDL" and input the description URI of the web dispatcher "http://webdispatcher:50000/manufacturing-papiservices/SfcStateServiceWSService?wsdl" and retrieve the webservices per WSDL.

The WSDL returns just one endpoint randomly in our high availability system (3 application servers available).

<soap:address xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" location="http://server1:50000/manufacturing-papiservices/SfcStateServiceWSService"/>

As long as the destination is not retrieved again, the PCo will send the requests all to this respective application server. No matter what happens with the server, if it is under high load, PCo do not care even when the server is not available the requests run into an error.

You have to reload the WSDL then to get a new endpoint of the existing two servers to work again.

Are there any best practives available to provide failover/loadbalancing in PCo for web service calls?

I now that we could download the WSDL and input the endpoint manually to the webdispatcher address, but when no verification of credentials are made and also no webservice updates came automatically, so there would be a high manual effort of maintaining this.

I am using PCo version 15.5.4.17

Thanks a lot