Options for handling failover in clustered environments

WebSEAL offers several solutions to the challenge of providing secure sharing of session state across multiple servers in a clustered environment. The following sections describe the options available for handling failover events in clustered environments:

• Option 1: No WebSEAL handling of failover events
  If the load balancer in front of the WebSEAL cluster is able to maintain session affinity for long periods of time, failover events can be very rare.
• Option 2: Authentication data included in each request
  Some authentication methods such as basic authentication or client-side certificates provide authentication data with every request.
• Option 3: Failover cookies
  
• Option 4: The distributed session cache
  The distributed session cache is used for session storage by all WebSEAL servers in the cluster. When a client fails over, the new WebSEAL server can retrieve the user's session data from the distributed session cache and therefore avoid prompting the user to log in again.
• Option 5: LTPA cookie
  

Parent topic: Session state overview

Related concepts

• Session state concepts
• Supported session ID data types
• Information retrieved from a client request
• Validation of the client identifier for a session
• WebSEAL session cache structure
• Deployment considerations for clustered environments