The eXtreme Scale session replication manager that is shipped with WebSphere eXtreme Scale can work with the default session manager in the application server to replicate session data from one process to another process to support user session data high availability.
The session manager has been designed so that it can run in any Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition Version 1.4 container. The session manager does not have any dependencies on WebSphere APIs, so it is capable of supporting various versions of WebSphere Application Server as well as vendor application server environments.
The HTTP session manager provides session replication capabilities for an associated application. The session replication manager works with web container's session manager to create HTTP sessions and manage the life cycles of HTTP sessions that are associated with the application. These life cycle management activities include: the invalidation of sessions based on a timeout or an explicit servlet or JavaServer Pages (JSP) call and the invocation of session listeners that are associated with the session or the web application. The session manager persists its sessions in an ObjectGrid instance. This instance can be a local, in-memory instance or a fully replicated, clustered and partitioned instance. The use of the latter topology allows the session manager to provide HTTP session failover support when application servers are shut down or end unexpectedly. The session manager can also work in environments that do not support affinity, when affinity is not enforced by a load balancer tier that sprays requests to the application server tier.
The session manager can be used in the following scenarios:
The session replication manager uses standard session listener to listen on the changes of session data, and persists the session data into an ObjectGrid instance either locally or remotely. The session data is reloaded in the request path through the standard servlet from the ObjectGrid instance either locally or remotely. You can add the session listener and servlet filter to every Web module in your application with tooling that ships with WebSphere eXtreme Scale. You can also manually add these listeners and filters to the Web deployment descriptor of your application.
This session replication manager works with each vendor's web container session manager to replicate session data across Java Virtual Machines. When the original server dies, users can retrieve session data from other servers.