This topic highlights what is new or changed, for users who are going to customize, administer, monitor, and tune production server environments. It also addresses those who are going to deploy and operate applications.
A new feature called session hot failover has been added to this release. This feature is only applicable to the peer-to-peer mode. In a clustered environment, session affinity in the WebSphere Application Server plug-in routes the requests for a given session to the same server. If the current owner server instance of the session fails, then the WebSphere Application Server plug-in routes the requests to another appropriate server in the cluster. For a cluster configured to run in the peer-to-peer mode this feature causes the plug-in to failover to a server that already contains the backup copy of the session, therefore avoiding the overhead of session retrieval from another server containing the backup. However, hot failover is specifically for servant region failures. When an entire server, meaning both controller and server fail, sessions may have to be retrieved over the network.