Load Balancer for IBM WebSphere Application Server Version
7.0 contains a number of new features.
The most significant new features are:
- Load Balancer can detect changes in your network configuration
without requiring you to restart the system.
- Configuring the LDAP URI advisor. The LDAP URI advisor
allows you better gauge Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
availability by processing a complete request to the LDAP server.
The LDAP URI advisor opens a connection to the LDAP serve and sends
a BIND request that is based on the advisorrequest field that you
define on the server object. The advisor then waits for a response
from the LDAP server and returns the elapsed time as a load.
- Use encapsulation forwarding to forward traffic across network segments. Use encapsulation
forwarding when the back-end server is not located on the same network
segment or if you are using virtualization technology and need to
forward packets that are otherwise unable to be forwarded.
- There are now three options for the selection algorithm that Load
Balancer uses to route traffic:
- connection (default): specifies that the server selection
is based on simple round-robin selection.
- affinity: specifies that the server selection is based
on client affinity.
- conn+affin: specifies that server selection is based on
an existing connection. For new connections, the server selection
is based on affinity.
Read dscontrol port for
more information on this command and the available options.
- Quiesce a server on a daily schedule. You can now quiesce servers
on a scheduled time to perform upgrades or general maintenance. Read
more about this feature in Quiesce servers for server maintenance windows.
- Support for ICMP forwarding and messaging. Load Balancer now supports
forwarding and processing ICMP messages to improve the robustness
of connection protocols and permit Load Balancer to receive ICMP fragmentation
messages.
- Crossport affinity allows you to expand the affinity feature across
multiple ports so that client requests received on different ports
can still be sent to the same server for subsequent requests. In order
to use this feature, the ports must:
- Share the same cluster address.
- Share the same servers.
- Use the affinity or conn+aff selection algorithm.
Refer to the dscontrol port command
for more information.
- Forward UDP packets. Load Balancer includes an improved algorithm
for handling connectionless UDP packets.
- Configure rules for servers or ports. You can configure rules
to route connections for the following scenarios:
- active: based on the number of active connections total
for the port. This rule will work only if the manager is running.
- true: specifies that this rule will always evaluate as
true.