High Availability Database

The HADB software is supplied with the Application Server standalone distribution of Sun Java System Application Server. For information about available distributions of Sun Java System Application Server, see Distribution Types and Their Components in Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 Installation Guide. HADB features are available only in the enterprise profile. For information about profiles, see Usage Profiles in Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 Administration Guide.

Application Server provides the High Availability Database (HADB) for high availability storage of HTTP session and stateful session bean data. HADB is designed to support up to 99.999% service and data availability with load balancing, failover, and state recovery. Generally, you must configure and manage HADB independently of Application Server.

Keeping state management responsibilities separated from Application Server has significant benefits. Application Server instances spend their cycles performing as a scalable and high performance application containers delegating state replication to an external high availability state service. Due to this loosely coupled architecture, Application Server instances can be very easily added to or deleted from a cluster. The HADB state replication service can be independently scaled for optimum availability and performance. When an Application Server instance also performs replication, the performance of Java EE applications can suffer and can be subject to longer garbage collection pauses.

Considerations for using High Availability Database:

• Provides 99.999% availability if guidelines are followed (redundant power supplies, network infrastructure, and so on).

• Needs additional hardware resources and careful sizing to perform efficiently.

  However, the HADB nodes could be on separate lower-cost dedicated machines rather than on large machines (which also helps with redundancy). HADB processes are fairly single-threaded, and do not make the best use of our multi-threaded processors. This means that more HADB nodes would need required to make best use of the resources, thus complicating the achievement of 99.999% availability.

• HADB is complex and tricky to administer

• Machines need to be on the same subnet. HADB nodes use UDP multicasting for heartbeats and cluster event notification.

For information on planning and setting up your application server installation for high availability with HADB, including determining hardware configuration, sizing, and topology, see Planning for Availability in Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 Deployment Planning Guide and Chapter 3, Selecting a Topology, in Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 Deployment Planning Guide.