WebLogic: HTTP load-balancing

The Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation HTTP screens are stateful, in the sense that a screen preserves state information for subsequent screens. As a result, you have to set up proxy servers or load-balancers to load-balance HTTP requests with a “sticky” load-balancing policy. This ensures HTTP requests go back to the server that have the session states.

Load-balancing can improve performance for large number of HTTP users because the user population is serviced by multiple application servers that are managed as a cluster. Load-balancing can be implemented with a variety of technologies ranging from the Apache proxy servers to hardware-based load balancers.

HTTP session replication

Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation supports HTTP in-memory session replication in the following configuration:

Note: The WebLogic webserver plugin is not bundled with the installer for WebLogic 11g (and later). You must download the plugin from Oracle’s website.
Note: The Apache or load-balancer idempotent flag must be set to OFF. In rare cases, for example, when a transaction completes and commits but was unable to post the response to the proxy server, the proxy server could retransmit the transaction. For some update transactions, this could result in duplicate update entries.