OAM : Oracle Traffic Director Licensing for Oracle Access Portal

Starting with Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11.1.2.2.x , the license includes Oracle Access Portal Service.

What is Oracle Access Portal (OAP) ?
The Access Portal Service is a hosted single sign-on proxy service that enables intranet and extranet applications with Oracle's form-fill single sign-on technology. Web Logon Manager, available as a standalone download from Oracle Support, provides end-users with the ability to create, modify, and delete application credentials as well as log on to provisioned applications through both desktop and mobile browsers. Available from 11gR2 PS2.

What is Oracle Traffic Director(OTD)  ? 
Oracle Traffic Director is a fast, reliable, and scalable layer-7 software load balancer. The architecture of Oracle Traffic Director enables it to handle large volumes of application traffic with low latency. The product is optimized for use in Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle SuperCluster.

OTD and OAP
For enabling the Oracle Access Portal Service, Oracle traffic Director (OTD) is mandatory as it intercepts user connections to the target application and provides path-proxy and DNS-proxy functionality, allowing for path and DNS rewriting.  It also hosts the WebGate plugin.

OTD Licensing for OAP
Though OTD is primarily licensed only for Exalogic , following are exceptions -

• The Oracle Traffic Director portion of the Oracle Access Portal is restricted to the following features: High Availability Virtual IP, Access Manager WebGate, and Origin Server Load Balancing to WebLogic Server.
• IDM Oracle Access Portal (OAP) license entitlement now includes OTD to be a front-end on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.6+, Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.6+ and Solaris (SPARC, x64) 11.1+.
  Access Management Licensing - http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E29542_01/doc.1111/e14860/im_options.htm#FMWLC240

Reference :

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/doc.1111/e14860/im_options.htm#FMWLC239

Is Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) Available/Licensed to use for a Non Exalogic setup? (Doc ID 1500970.1)

OAM 11gR2/Weblogic : The important of parameters in mod_wl_ohs.conf(Web Server plugins)

Configurations of various parameters in web server plugins plays in a major part in ensuring that Single-Sign-On works fine using OAM.

Oracle Documentation -
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e14395/plugin_params.htm

This post is intended to share my experiences with certain parameters and the repercussions if you don't include them :)

WLProxyPassThrough
WLProxySSl works great if webserver is doing the SSL work. But if SSL being terminated by a load balancer then mod_wl will remove any incoming WL-Proxy-SSL and the request will reach OHS over HTTP this means that the WebLogic server won't ever get that header and so request.isSecure() will always return false. If you add that directive and set it to ON then the WebLogic plug-in will not remove any incoming WL-Proxy-SSL header. This lets WebLogic Server know that the original request was initiated over SSL.  WL-Proxy-SSL header should not be sent if the inbound traffic to the load balancer was not SSL (HTTPS).

Error Scenario : 
Once I added this parameter for under the <if weblogic_module> tag and set it to true, this issue no longer reccurred .




WLCookieName
If you change the name of the WebLogic Server session cookie in the WebLogic Server Web application, you need to change the WLCookieName parameter in the plug-in to the same value. The name of the WebLogic session cookie is set in the WebLogic-specific deployment descriptor, in the <session-descriptor> element.

Error Scenario :
The Webcenter Portal application I was implementing SSO using OAM for, had changed the weblogic session cookie name to a non-JSESSION ID value for some reason.
This was not giving me any issues until I was configuring "Weblogic Cluster" value(instead of "Weblogic Host") in the OHS layer pointing to the Webcenter managed servers.Once I did so,the Webcenter Portal page would not load and instead would give me a flickering page with consistently changing values of adf_ctrl.state and the page would not load up.
This issue was resolved once I added WLCookieName <cookieName> under the context root tag for the Webcenter Portal app in mod_wl_ohs.conf

This post is also relevant in this regard.