What is new in this release

Load Balancer for IBM WebSphere Application Server contains a number of new features.

New feature New feature:
The new features that are described in this topic are current as of the original release of the product version. Changes in this documentation that are related to service releases are marked with fix pack icons. Features marked with this icon are introduced as new in the third quarter, 2010 Beta refresh.newfeat
The new features in this release are:
Installing Load Balancer
  • Load Balancer for IPv4 and IPv6 can be installed with IBM Installation manager through the graphical user interface, or you can record and use response files to install the product silently.
  • Load Balancer can be installed and run on exclusive IP zones with dedicated network interface cards.
Content Based Routing (CBR) component
Content based routing provides the ability to balance the load based on the content of the client requests, such as URI.
Site Selector component
Site Selector provides the ability to balance the load on servers within a local or wide area network using a DNS round-robin approach or a more advanced user-specified approach. Site Selector works in conjunction with a name server to map DNS names to IP addresses.
Dispatcher component
The Dispatcher component balances traffic among your servers through a unique combination of load balancing and a management software.
Using NAT forwarding to forward traffic
Using Network Address Translation (NAT) Dispatcher capability removes the limitation for the backend servers to be located on a locally attached network.
Using collocated servers for the Dispatcher component
Load Balancer can reside on the same machine as a server for which it is load balancing requests. This is commonly referred to as collocating a server. It is supported on Linux and AIX only.
Quiesce servers or services for maintenance windows
When you want to bring down a particular service on a server, like HTTP, you can now quiesce individual daemons. If you have added server1 to port 80 and port 22 of a cluster, for example, the usual quiesce command will stop forwarding traffic to server1 on port 80 and port 22. This new option allows you to stop traffic only on port 80 if you need to stop that particular service.
Detecting server failures with heartbeats and reach targets
This feature provides the ability to replicate connection and affinity records between high availability partners. When the records are replicated, connection and affinity states are preserved so that the connections can continue even after takeover has taken place.
Update the network configuration automatically
Load Balancer requires information about all interfaces and IP addresses configured on a machine, and this information can be obtained manually or configured to be automatically updated.
Reset connections to down servers
The TCP reset feature sends a TCP reset to clients that are connected to servers that have weights of 0. A server's weight can be 0 if it is configured to 0 or if an advisor marks the server down.
Optimize connections with client-to-server affinity
Enable port affinity override for a specific server. You can override the stickiness of a port for a specific server with this feature, but you must be using the conn+affinity selection algorithm. The port affinity override feature can be useful in certain situations, like if you are using rules.
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Last updated: January 17, 2013 11:24 AM EST
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