Replicators and replication domains
Replicators are the producers and consumers that are responsible for moving data from one location to another in a clustered environment. In v5.x of WebSphere Application Server, the underlying transport used is Java Message Service (JMS) messages.
More configuration is required in WebSphere Application Server v5 than in v6. Administrators need to create replicators within a replication domain. The default configuration is for all the application servers in a domain to connect to all the other application servers, as shown in Figure | -4.
Figure 4-4 Default configuration for v5 DRS.
It is possible to reduce the overhead by limiting which application servers talk to which by using partitions. Those that are configured to talk to each other are a partition and also part of a Multi-Broker Replication Domain.
In WebSphere Application Server v6 it is not necessary to create and configure replicators, and the concept of partitioning is masked. It is still possible to limit the number of copies of the data, but it is not necessary to expose the details of the configuration.