Cluster

A cluster is a named collection of server instances sharing the same set of applications, resources, and configuration information. A server instance can belong to exactly one cluster. A cluster facilitates server instance load-balancing through distribution of a load across multiple machines. A cluster facilitates high availability through instance-level failover. From an administrative perspective, a cluster represents a virtualized entity in which operations on a cluster (e.g. deployment of an application) act on all instances that make up the cluster.

Horizontal scaling is achieved by adding Enterprise Server instances to a cluster, thereby increasing the capacity of the system. It is possible to add Enterprise Server instances to a cluster without disrupting service. The HTTP, RMI/IIOP, and JMS load balancing systems distribute requests to healthy Enterprise Server instances in the cluster.

High Availability - Availability allows for failover protection of Enterprise Server instances in a cluster. If one application server instance goes down, another Enterprise Server instance takes over the sessions that were assigned to the unavailable server. Session information is stored using the session replication feature or by using the high-availability database (HADB). HADB supports the persistence of HTTP sessions and stateful session beans.