Load Balancer for IBM WebSphere Application Server contains
a number of new features.

New feature:
The new features that are described in this
topic are current as of the original release of the product version.
Changes in this documentation that are related to service releases
are marked with fix pack icons. Features marked with this icon are
introduced as new in the third quarter, 2010 Beta refresh.newfeat
The new features in this release are:
- Installing Load Balancer
- Load Balancer for IPv4 and IPv6 can be installed with IBM Installation
manager through the graphical user interface, or you can record and
use response files to install the product silently.
- Load Balancer can be installed and run on exclusive IP zones with
dedicated network interface cards.
- Content Based Routing (CBR) component
- Content based routing provides the ability to balance the load
based on the content of the client requests, such as URI.
- Site Selector component
- Site Selector provides the ability to balance the load on servers
within a local or wide area network using a DNS round-robin approach
or a more advanced user-specified approach. Site Selector works in
conjunction with a name server to map DNS names to IP addresses.
- Dispatcher component
- The Dispatcher component balances traffic among your servers through
a unique combination of load balancing and a management software.
- Using NAT forwarding to forward traffic
- Using Network Address Translation (NAT) Dispatcher capability
removes the limitation for the backend servers to be located on a
locally attached network.
- Using collocated servers for the Dispatcher component
- Load Balancer can reside on the same machine as a server for which
it is load balancing requests. This is commonly referred to as collocating
a server. It is supported on Linux and AIX only.
- Quiesce servers or services for maintenance windows
- When you want to bring down a particular service on a server,
like HTTP, you can now quiesce individual daemons. If you have added
server1 to port 80 and port 22 of a cluster, for example, the usual
quiesce command will stop forwarding traffic to server1 on port 80
and port 22. This new option allows you to stop traffic only on port
80 if you need to stop that particular service.
- Detecting server failures with heartbeats and reach targets
- This feature provides the ability to replicate connection and
affinity records between high availability partners. When the records
are replicated, connection and affinity states are preserved so that
the connections can continue even after takeover has taken place.
- Update the network configuration automatically
- Load Balancer requires information about all interfaces and IP
addresses configured on a machine, and this information can be obtained
manually or configured to be automatically updated.
- Reset connections to down servers
- The TCP reset feature sends a TCP reset to clients that are connected
to servers that have weights of 0. A server's weight can be 0 if it
is configured to 0 or if an advisor marks the server down.
- Optimize connections with client-to-server affinity
- Enable port affinity override for a specific server. You can override
the stickiness of a port for a specific server with this feature,
but you must be using the conn+affinity selection algorithm. The port
affinity override feature can be useful in certain situations, like
if you are using rules.