Building a Stable and Clustered J2EE Environment?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday June 25, 2003 @01:34PM from the sharing-sessions-between-multiple-machines dept.

royles asks: "I am working with several J2EE Application Servers and all seems fine until I start to scale and cluster. The goal is to ensure a web and EJB session is maintained across a pool of Application Servers. The level of complexity to achieve this straightforward requirement is proving too much. It quickly becomes evident that vendors claims of 'robust and scalable' go straight out the window in favour of extortionate support and consultant costs when the installation becomes large. Anybody else experienced this type of problem? What are other peoples experienceâ(TM)s in this area? Any recommendations on Application servers that âdo what they say on the tinâ(TM)? Any good online resources for achieving a highly scaled and robust solution?"

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Clustering is hard, you can't avoid it by mlq · 2003-06-25 16:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

Clustering *is* hard. And even the best application server in the world can't reduce that complexity. It can just try to not add any complexity of it's own.
Front-end load balancing, internal load balancing policy, cache settings, fail-over settings, setting up the LAN correctly... these are all *extra* things you need to do under a clustered J2EE server that you don't need to worry about normally. Clustering is hard
Having said that, I've been involved in commercial projects using clustering under Weblogic and JBoss. We have been able to get them going without too much trouble.
Also, some things J2EE allows some things in non-clustered mode that it explicity warns won't work in clustered mode. For example, objects in Sessions must be Serializable when clustering.
=Matt