In some very specific instances, you may want CUIC Web servers to share a database but query different AW/HDS servers, to split load. At first glance this doesn't seem possible as the AW/HDS that is queried is defined by a data source, which is stored in the CUIC database. However, there is a workaround which I'll show you in this post.

Let's say you have two Web servers, Server A and Server B. You want Server A to query against HDS 1 (IP address 192.168.0.1) and you want Server B to query against HDS 2 (IP address 192.168.0.2). However, you want to use the same data source for all reports so that you don't have to keep a duplicate copy of each report pointing to a separate data source.

The trick is that when you set up the data source, you don't use an actual HDS machine name or IP address in the "Server" field. You will supply a bogus "alias" name, which we can then redirect using the Windows host file.

Let's call our alias "HDSREDIRECT". You would plug "HDSREDIRECT" into your data source configuration as the server name. Obviously that will not work right away, there's one more step. You'll have to edit the host file on each of the Web server, typically located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc, the filename is simply "hosts".

In order to make the "HDSREDIRECT" alias work, and split the traffic between the two AW/HDS servers, you would add this line to Server A (which, remember, you want to query HDS 1):

192.168.0.1 HDSREDIRECT

And you would add this line to the hosts file on Server B (which we want to query HDS 2):

192.168.0.2 HDSREDIRECT

Note that the name of the alias is the same on both servers, but the IP address is different.

And that's it! Because the Web server issues the request to the AW/HDS, it will use the hosts file to determine which IP address to query. Just make sure that your security configuration matches up on the two AW/HDS servers and you should be good to go!