Using Clusters to Improve Availability

At the most basic level, a cluster is a group of application server instances—often hosted on multiple physical servers—that appear to clients as a single instance. This provides horizontal scalability as well as higher availability than a single instance on a single machine. This basic level of clustering works in conjunction with the Application Server’s HTTP load balancer plug-in, which accepts HTTP and HTTPS requests and forwards them to one of the application server instances in the cluster. The ORB and integrated JMS brokers also perform load balancing to application server clusters. If an instance fails, become unavailable (due to network faults), or becomes unresponsive, requests are redirected only to existing, available machines. The load balancer can also recognize when an failed instance has recovered and redistribute load accordingly.

The HTTP load balancer also provides a health checker program that can monitor servers and specific URLs to determine whether they are available. You must carefully manage the overhead of health checking so that it does not become a large processing burden itself.

For stateless applications or applications that only involve low-value, simple user transactions, a simple load balanced cluster is often all that is required. For stateful, mission-critical applications, consider using HADB for session persistence. For an overview of HADB, see High-Availability Database in Chapter 1, Product Concepts Application Server Administration Guide.

To perform online upgrades of applications, it is best to group the application server instances into multiple clusters. The Application Server has the ability to quiesce both applications and instances. Quiescence is the ability to take an instance (or group of instances) or a specific application offline in a controlled manner without impacting the users currently being served by the instance or application. As one instance is quiesced, new users are served by the upgraded application on another instance. This type of application upgrade is called a rolling upgrade. For more information on upgrading live applications, see Upgrading Applications Without Loss of Availability in Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 High Availability Administration Guide.