Introduction: Application servers
Application servers provide the core functionality of WAS v7 family. Application servers extend the ability of a Web server to handle Web app requests, and much more. An appserver enables a server to generate a dynamic, customized response to a client request.
Workload management optimizes the distribution of client processing tasks. Incoming work requests are distributed to the appservers that can most effectively process the requests. Workload management also provides failover when servers are not available, improving application availability.
Clusters are sets of appservers that are managed together and participate in workload management.
The servers that are members of a cluster can be on different host machines, as opposed to the servers that are part of the same node and must be located on the same host machine.
Subtopics
Introduction: Application servers
Introduction: Web servers
Introduction: Clusters