Planning Failover Capacity

Failover capacity planning implies deciding how many additional servers and processes you need to add to the Application Server deployment so that in the event of a server or process failure, the system can seamlessly recover data and continue processing. If your system gets overloaded, a process or server failure might result, causing response time degradation or even total loss of service. Preparing for such an occurrence is critical to successful deployment.

To maintain capacity, especially at peak loads, add spare machines running Application Server instances to the existing deployment.

For example, consider a system with two machines running one Application Server instance each. Together, these machines handle a peak load of 300 requests per second. If one of these machines becomes unavailable, the system will be able to handle only 150 requests, assuming an even load distribution between the machines. Therefore, half the requests during peak load will not be served.