Balancing workloads with server clusters

A server cluster is a set of servers that are managed together and participate in workload management. Administrators can create and configure server clusters in an existing server and bus environment.

Before you begin

Before creating a clustered environment, you should take the following actions:
  1. Plan and prepare your environment to use server clusters. For example, consider the following items:
    • Ensure that you have adequate resources to implement clustering successfully.
    • Determine if clustered servers would be beneficial for your applications. If an application has a large number of requests, installing on a cluster could help improve processing throughput. Other reasons to consider installing on a cluster includes availability of the application during scheduled maintenance and during equipment failures.
    • Determine if any of the applications contain services.
    • Familiarize yourself with Network Deployment and clustering support provided by WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, version 6. For more information about the clustering support, see the related topics.
    • Review this task before performing any of the steps.
  2. Create a network deployment cell, by creating a Deployment Manager profile, one or more custom profiles, and federating the custom profiles into the deployment manager cell.

Why and when to perform this task

If you want to balance workload, such as service requests, over a set of servers, you can create a server cluster, then add servers as members of that cluster. You can also create a backup cluster, to provide failover support for the server cluster that it is assigned to.

To assist you in understanding how to configure and use clusters for workload management, consider this scenario. Client requests are distributed among the cluster members on a single machine. (A client refers to any service requester, servlet, Java application, or other program or component that connects the end user with a server.) In more complex workload management scenarios, you can distribute cluster members to remote machines.

For more information about managing server clusters, see the following sub-topics, which provide information related to using server clusters with enterprise service bus and provide links to appropriate WebSphere Application Server topics:


Last updated: Wed 06 Dec 2006 07:08:08

(c) Copyright IBM Corporation 2005, 2006.
This information center is powered by Eclipse technology (http://www.eclipse.org)