Sun Java System Access Manager 7 2005Q4 Deployment Planning Guide

Configuring the Load Balancer for Sticky Sessions

A load balancer deployed with Access Manager must support sticky sessions. A sticky session specifies that once a session is created by a specific Access Manager instance, subsequent requests from the user will continue to be routed to that same instance, in order to preserve session information. Because Access Manager uses cookies to relay session information, the load balancer must redirect the request to the Access Manager instance that created the session. Without sticky sessions, all Access Manager instances would have to be trusted and performance could be impaired. You can implement sticky sessions using either the setcookie function or load balancer cookies.

For more information, see Using a Load Balancer With Access Manager.