HTTP Load Balancer Plug-in

The load balancer distributes the workload among multiple physical machines, thereby increasing the overall throughput of the system. The Enterprise Server includes the load balancer plug-in for the Sun Java System Web Server, the Apache Web Server, and Microsoft Internet Information Server.

The load balancer plug-in accepts HTTP and HTTPS requests and forwards them to one of the application server instances in the cluster. Should an instance fail, become unavailable (due to network faults), or become unresponsive, requests are redirected to existing, available machines. The load balancer can also recognize when a failed instance has recovered and redistribute the load accordingly.

For simple stateless applications, a load-balanced cluster may be sufficient. However, for mission-critical applications with session state, use load balanced clusters with HADB.

To setup a system with load balancing, in addition to the Application Server, you must install a web server and the load-balancer plug-in. Then you must:

• Create Enterprise Server clusters that you want to participate in load balancing.

• Deploy applications to these load-balanced clusters.

Server instances and clusters participating in load balancing have a homogenous environment. Usually that means that the server instances reference the same server configuration, can access the same physical resources, and have the same applications deployed to them. Homogeneity assures that before and after failures, the load balancer always distributes load evenly across the active instances in the cluster.

Use the asadmin command-line tool to create a load balancer configuration, add references to clusters and server instances to it, enable the clusters for reference by the load balancer, enable applications for load balancing, optionally create a health checker, generate the load balancer configuration file, and finally copy the load balancer configuration file to your web server config directory. An administrator can create a script to automate this entire process.

For more details and complete configuration instructions, see Chapter 4, Configuring HTTP Load Balancing, in Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 High Availability Administration Guide.