Highly Available Clusters

A cluster is a collection of instances that work together as one logical entity. A cluster provides a runtime environment for one or more Java EE applications. A highly available cluster integrates a state replication service with clusters and load balancer.

Using clusters provides the following advantages:

• High availability, by allowing for failover protection for the server instances in a cluster. If one server instance goes down, other server instances take over the requests that the unavailable server instance was serving.

• Scalability, by allowing for the addition of server instances to a cluster, thus increasing the capacity of the system. The load balancer plug-in distributes requests to the available server instances within the cluster. No disruption in service is required as an administrator adds more server instances to a cluster.

All instances in a cluster:

• Reference the same configuration.

• Have the same set of deployed applications (for example, a Java EE application EAR file, a web module WAR file, or an EJB JAR file).

• Have the same set of resources, resulting in the same JNDI namespace.

Every cluster in the domain has a unique name; furthermore, this name must be unique across all node agent names, server instance names, cluster names, and configuration names. The name must not be domain. You perform the same operations on a cluster (for example, deploying applications and creating resources) that you perform on an unclustered server instance.

Clusters and Configurations

A cluster's settings are derived from a named configuration, which can potentially be shared with other clusters. A cluster whose configuration is not shared by other server instances or clusters is said to have a stand-alone configuration . By default, the name of this configuration is cluster_name -config, where cluster_name is the name of the cluster.

A cluster that shares its configuration with other clusters or instances is said to have a shared configuration.

Clusters, Instances, Sessions, and Load Balancing

Clusters, server instances, load balancers, and sessions are related as follows:

• A server instance is not required to be part of a cluster. However, an instance that is not part of a cluster cannot take advantage of high availability through transfer of session state from one instance to other instances.

• The server instances within a cluster can be hosted on one or multiple machines. You can group server instances across different machines into a cluster.

• A particular load balancer can forward requests to server instances on multiple clusters. You can use this ability of the load balancer to perform an online upgrade without loss of service. For more information, see “Using Multiple Clusters for Online Upgrades Without Loss of Service” in the chapter “Configuring Clusters”

• A single cluster can receive requests from multiple load balancers. If a cluster is served by more than one load balancer, you must configure the cluster in exactly the same way on each load balancer.

• Each session is tied to a particular cluster. Therefore, although you can deploy an application on multiple clusters, session failover will occur only within a single cluster.

The cluster thus acts as a safe boundary for session failover for the server instances within the cluster. You can use the load balancer and upgrade components within the Enterprise Server without loss of service.