This section describes the session replication operation in detail.
At the end of a web request, the Web Server determines whether the session data needs to be copied through the session replication configuration that is stored in the server configuration file, the server.xml.
Consider a use case of four instances forming a cluster with session replication enabled on the Administration Server.
The session replication process in a Web Server cluster of four instances (A, B, C, and D) running on four nodes is as follows:
Instance A is backup of D, B is backup of A, C is backup of B, and D is backup of C. This forms a complete backup ring.
Each instance in the cluster keeps track of a static list of all the instances in the cluster and an active backup instance.
Depending on the configuration, session data is sent to the backup instance synchronously at the end of each request.
The failover process in a Web Server clustered environmentis as follows:
The load balancer redirects all incoming web requests destined for instance A to the remaining instances in the cluster and the backup ring is re-configured as follows:
D detects that its backup A is down and selects the next instance to A on the ordered list as its new backup instance.
B is selected and D establishes a new backup connection to B. B now holds two backups: a read-only backup of A and an active backup of D.
The backup ring is now complete with B backing up to C, C backing up to D, and D backing up to B.
When the failed instance A is made available again, it rejoins the backup ring by sending its designated backup instance B a rejoin message and establishes a backup connection to B.
When D detects that Ais online by either receiving a successful ping return from A or by receiving a message from A, D then establishes a backup connection to A and terminates its backup connection to B.
Web Server 7.0 does not support the following features in session replication:
Recovering the simultaneous failures of two or more instances.
The interval between two failures must be greater than the time needed for a resurrected instance to fully recover.
Session backup to more than one instance. In normal operation, there are only two copies of any session: the primary session and a backup session.
Session persistence: Sessions are only backed up in memory of another instance for the purpose of failover
Web Server supports session replication for only Java web applications. If you are using non-Java applications such as CGI or PHP, the session data cannot be replicated.