Dell One Identity Virtual Directory Server (VDS) is an LDAP proxy plus virtual directory, and also supports many other protocols and a variety of processing functionality that will allow you to gain more control over your identity infrastructure. This guide will help you to quickly create and run a configuration. You will need to have VDS installed, and this guide assumes that it is installed in the directory /opt/dell/vds/std in Unix systems and is accessible through Start Menu in Windows systems.
VDS works by listening on the network for requests using one or more protocols. These requests can then be evaluated and acted upon. Back-end servers, such as LDAP directories, relational databases and other types of data sources can be accessed, and requests can be routed to them.
In most common usage patterns, VDS acts as an LDAP proxy. This means that LDAP clients connect to VDS, instead of connecting directly to the LDAP server. Since VDS acts like an LDAP server, LDAP clients do not "notice" that they are in fact connecting to a proxy - the applications behave as if they were talking to an LDAP server directly.
VDS will typically be configured to connect to one or more backend LDAP servers (and potentially other data sources) as required. However, by utilizing VDS, requests can be intercepted and transformed, by applying logical rules and processing scripts, and then be routed to one or more backend servers, or can optionally be responded to without forwarding the request on to a backend server at all.
Before creating a configuration, you must be aware of the basic concepts of VDS: input, processing and output. VDS supports these concepts through Listeners, Stages and DataSources. The following short description of the VDS concepts are vital for the comprehension on how to create configurations.
Listeners are the input for VDS - they define the network ports that applications will connect to. In order for VDS to work properly, you must at least configure one listener. Listeners are configured by specifying the protocol which they should support; multiple listeners can be defined on different ports and/or IP addresses. If you do not specify a listen address, VDS will, by default, listen on the specified port on all IP addresses that the system has. Otherwise, the listener will only listen on the specified port of the specified IP address.
A listener can have an optional Default DataSource. This is the default output back-end that requests will be routed to, unless they are being processed by one or more stages that act on the requests.
As an alternative to a default DataSource, a Virtual Tree can be constructed and attached to a listener. In this case, various nodes from any DataSource in the configuration can be attached or mounted onto the Virtual Tree to service particular request types.
A listener can also have a list of stages where processing of requests will occur.
For typical configurations, you will need to define one or more LDAP or LDAPS (LDAP + SSL) listeners.
DataSources are the output of VDS - they are comprised of the back-end servers that VDS will send requests to. In a typical configuration, you will need to define at least one DataSource. DataSources are typically back-end LDAP servers or relational databases, but it is also possible to create server DataSources that use different protocols and access mechanisms in more advanced configurations. DataSources are groups of one or more servers that contain the same data. When a DataSource contains multiple servers, it is possible to load-balance operations between those servers, or to use a fail-over mechanism to automatically route requests around a failed server, to another server in the DataSource.
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