Creating a cluster of machines
This technique applies to the Web presentation server, the Web application server, and the directory and security servers. The primary goal here is to service more client requests. Parallelism in machine clusters typically leads to improvements in response time. Also, system availability is improved due to failover safety in replicas. The service running in a replica may have associated with it state information that must be preserved across client requests, and thus should be shared among machines.
State sharing is probably the most important issue with machine clusters and can complicate the deployment of this technique. WebSphere's workload balancing feature uses an efficient data-sharing technique to support clustering. Issues such as additional system management for hardware and software can also be challenging. IBM WAS Network Deployment V5.1 provides the WebSphere Edge Components that can be used for Web server load balancing/clustering and also allows you to create appserver clusters.
WebSphere is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
IBM is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.