InfoCenter Home >
7: Multimachine management >
7.1: Using WebSphere Application Server in a multimachine environment >
7.1.1: Scaling up WebSphere applications

7.1.1: Scaling up WebSphere applications

Multimachine applications can be configured in a variety of ways to scale up a system to add more processing power, improve security, maximize availability, and balance workloads. The WebSphere Application Server, Advanced Edition provides several ways to implement configurations that address these issues. These scaling techniques are generally combined to maximize the benefits and minimize the problems associated with multimachine systems.

  • Server groups and cloning. Cloning allows the creation of multiple copies of an application server. The first step is to create a server group based upon the application server's current configuration. You can then create clones of the server group. Clones can be created on the same physical machine or on different machines. Using clones can improve the performance of a server, simplify its administration, and enable the use of workload managment; however, there is a point of diminishing returns when adding more clones slows down the system due to the extra network traffic required for managing the clones.
  • Workload management (WLM). Incoming processing requests from clients are transparently distributed among the clones of an application server. WLM enables both load balancing and failover, improving the reliability and scalability of WebSphere applications. In addition, administrative servers can participate in WLM for failover support.
  • IP sprayer. An IP sprayer transparently redirects incoming HTTP requests from Web clients to a set of Web servers. Although the clients behave as if they are communicating directly with a given Web server, the IP sprayer is actually intercepting all requests and distributing them among all the available Web servers in the cluster. IP sprayers (such as IBM Network Dispatcher or Cisco Local Director) can provide scalability, load balancing, and failover for Web servers.
Go to previous article: Using multimachine environments Go to next article: Availability management

 

 
Go to previous article: Using multimachine environments Go to next article: Availability management