Selecting a front end for your WebSphere Application Server topology

You can select an intermediary to provide session affinity, failover support, and workload balancing for your WebSphere® Application Server topology.

You can also use the following stabilized components as a reverse proxy between an HTTP client and a clustered application, or a partitioned application.:

See the WebSphere DataPower Information Center at http://www.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/library/documentation for more information about using WebSphere DataPower.

Use your web server of choice and the corresponding web server plug-ins, unless you want to use the enhanced capabilities of a WebSphere DataPower appliance, such as WS-Addressing, custom advisors, QOS, and SLA.

The following tables compare the core application server frontend functionality, and the non-core functionality of a web server plug-in running in a modern web server, such as the IBM HTTP Server, based on Apache HTTP Server (with and without Intelligent Management), the on demand router, a WebSphere Application Server proxy server, a DMZ Secure Proxy Server for IBM WebSphere Application Server, and a WebSphere DataPower Service Gateway.

Table 1. Core functionality.
Functionality Web server plug-in used with either the IBM HTTP Server or the Apache Web Server Web server plug-in used with either the IBM HTTP Server or the Apache Web Server with Intelligent Management WebSphere DataPower Service Gateway On Demand Router (ODR) DMZ Secure Proxy Server for IBM WebSphere Application Server -OR- WebSphere Application Server proxy server
Session affinity Yes Yes Yes18, Yes1, 2 Yes (for DMZ proxy only) 1, 2
DMZ ready Yes Yes Yes No Yes (for DMZ proxy only)
Custom advisors are supported No No Yes No No
Service Level Agreement (SLA) No No Yes Yes No
SIP proxy No No No Yes Yes
ESI dynamic Caching Yes Yes No Yes 3 Yes 3
Managed from the administrative console Yes Yes Partial19 Yes Yes4
Stream caching (large response caching) Yes Yes No Yes Yes
Dynamically receive management events5 No No Yes18 Yes6 Yes6
Multi cells routing No No Yes20 Yes8 Yes8
Performance monitoring Yes9 Yes9 Yes Yes10 Yes10
Load Balancing (weighted round-robin) Yes11 Yes11 Yes Yes11 Yes11
Routing rules are configurable No12 No12 Yes Yes Yes
Interoperability with WLM Yes13 Yes13 Yes18 Yes Yes
Web service affinity and failover (WS Addressing) No No Yes18 Yes Yes
Rule expression and custom routing No Yes Yes21 Yes15 Yes15
Generic server cluster (GSC) affinity and failover No No Yes Yes16 Yes16
Per Request Trace No Yes Yes Yes No
Weighted Least Outstanding Request (WLOR) No Yes Yes Yes No
Health Policy Support No Yes Yes Yes No
Table notes:
  1. Session affinity is supported for WebSphere Application Server managed resources. However, some session management custom properties, such as HttpSessionCloneId, are not supported.
  2. For generic server routing, where the resources are not WebSphere Application Server managed resources, active session affinity and passive session affinity need to be configured under generic server routing action.
  3. WebSphere Application Server proxy servers and DMZ Secure Proxy Servers for IBM WebSphere Application Server do not support fragment caching. Only whole page caching, and the ESI invalidation servlet are supported.
  4. Secure proxy profile on a DMZ installation can only be managed using scripting or an administrative agent. Configuration-only secure proxy profile can be managed through scripting or the administrative agent console. If you use an administrative agent console, you must register a proxy profile with the administrative agent.
  5. As performed by ODR in a WebSphere Extended Deployment environment.
  6. Static routing needs to be turned off and core group bridge tunneling needs to be enabled for both the DMZ Secure Proxy Server for IBM WebSphere Application Server, and the core group bridge interface for the WebSphere Application Server, Network Deployment cells.
  7. Requires core group bridge setup between the proxy cell and other cells.
  8. Static routing needs to be turned off and core group bridge tunneling needs to be enabled for both the DMZ Secure Proxy Server for IBM WebSphere Application Server, and the core group bridge interface for the WebSphere Application Server, Network Deployment cells.
  9. The web server plug-in statistics are obtained from request metrics.
  10. WebSphere Application Server proxy server statistics and DMZ Secure Proxy Server for IBM WebSphere Application Server statistics can be retrieved from Tivoli performance viewer, ARM, and performance mBeans.
  11. Random Load balancing is supported in addition to weighted round robin.
  12. Web server plug-in can only do static routing.
  13. A web server plug-in indirectly has interoperability with WLM through the exchange of dynamic workload manager (DWLM) Partition Tables between the web server plug-in and WebSphere Application Server. The plug-in uses these tables for dynamic routing and failover scenarios within a cluster.
  14. The proxy server uses the WebSphere Application Server WLM even if the proxy server is running on a z/OS operating system.
  15. The DataPower appliance manager provides faster web service affinity and failover service than Java proxy provides.
  16. Rule expression and custom routing allows administrators to override default WebSphere Application Server routing behavior. For example, you might not want requests forwarded to server1 in a cluster between 11:00 PM and 12:00 PM because you regularly apply maintenance to that server during that time interval.
  17. Proxy server supports load balancing and failover for generic server clusters with passive and/or active affinity.
  18. Requires WebSphere DataPower AO module.
  19. Configuration with regards to cluster members, weights, session affinity, and application edition support is performed via the WebSphere Application Server ISC Console, but it is retrieved and acted upon by WebSphere DataPower.
  20. Multi cell routing is based on policy and rule configuration within DataPower. This is independent of the WebSphere Application Server configuration.
  21. Content-based routing is provided via WebSphere DataPower configuration policy and stylesheets.
Table 2. Functionality provided outside of the web server plug-in.
Functionality Web server plug-in used with either the IBM HTTP Server or the Apache Web Server with or without Intelligent Management WebSphere DataPower Service Gateway On Demand Router (ODR) DMZ Secure Proxy Server for IBM WebSphere Application Server -OR- WebSphere Application Server proxy server
Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Yes No No No
Request URI rewriting Yes Yes No No
Efficient static file serving Yes No Basic1 Basic1
Compression Yes Yes Yes Yes
Response filtering Yes Yes Yes2 Yes2
SSL termination Yes Yes Yes Yes
Cryptographic Accelerator3 Yes Yes Yes4 Yes4
FIPS Yes Yes Yes Yes
Third-party/customer-written plug-ins Yes Yes8 No No
Logging Yes Yes Yes5 Yes5
Custom logging Yes Yes Yes No
Disk caching Yes No Yes Yes
Asynchronous request handling none or partial6 Yes Yes7 Yes7
Table notes:
  1. WebSphere Application Server proxy servers support basic static file serving.
  2. WebSphere Application Server proxy servers support HTML link rewriting.
  3. This functionality only applies to Cryptographic Accelerators that WebSphere Application Server supports. See the Supported hardware and software web page .
  4. The support is provided by IBM JDK/JCE.
  5. Only NCSA common format is supported.
  6. The connection between a web server plug-in and an application server is synchronous and consumes a thread while reading/writing or waiting for data. See your web server documentation for information about how your particular web server handles client connections.
  7. Proxy server is optimized to handle AJAX long polling requests under large scale deployments.
  8. Sophisticated rules and custom processing can be achieved using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).
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