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Application servers
Application servers provide the core functionality of the WebSphere Application Server product family. They extend the ability of a Web server to handle Web application requests, and much more. An application server enables a server to generate a dynamic, customized response to a client request.
For additional overview, refer to Welcome to Application Servers.
Clusters
Workload management optimizes the distribution of client processing tasks. Incoming work requests are distributed to the application servers that can most effectively process the requests. Workload management also provides failover when servers are not available, improving application availability.
Clusters are sets of application servers 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.
For additional overview, refer to Welcome to Clusters.
JMS servers
The JMS functions on a node within the WebSphere Application Server administration domain are served by the JMS server on that node. The JMS server enables application servers to access JMS resources.
For additional overview about managing JMS servers and JMS resources, refer to Administering WebSphere JMS support.