Clustering/Failover Considerations

In order to configure a cluster of BPEL Service Engines, you must adhere to the following guidelines.

• Persistence must be enabled for both clustering and failover.

• To run persistence, all BPEL Service Engines must be restarted.

• Service assemblies must be deployed manually across all clustered JBI environments.

• Clustering/failover is implemented consistently for the specific protocol and binding components involved in a given business process.

• Only a single database can be used for all BPEL Service Engines when implementing clustering/failover.

• The database must be highly available; should the database fail, clustering/failover will fail.

• When a BPEL Service Engine fails, a single BPEL Service Engine picks up those instances without distributing them across the cluster. Consequently, a large number of failed over instances can overload an entire cluster, one service engine at a time—a sort of domino effect.

• All BPEL Service Engines in a cluster must reside in the same time zone.

• The following inbound message activities (within flows) are not supported by failover: Receive, On-Message, On-Event.