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, as a sort of domino effect.

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

For more information on Clustering and Failover support for the BPEL Service Engine, see Practical Guide for Testing Clustering Support for the BPEL Service Engine