A model is a template for creating additional, nearly identical copies of an administrative resource and its contents. Usually, the administrative resource is an application server. The resource is referred to as the original. The copies are called clones.
The clones can be used for workload management purposes. That is, a request for the original server can be handled by any of the clones in the server group. The clones might be distributed (located on different machines). Cloning also supports failover and vertical scaling.