Re: Preference for managed servers?

David Ingham wrote:
> The problem i was having was that despite the fact i only specified 2 of
the 6 the managed servers in my cluster in the config file it would end up
finding the other 4 from the cluster and start routing requests to those. Which
due the differences in geographical location is was not what we wanted. This
happens because after the first request the cluster responds with a
"Dynamic Server List" which the cluster constantly updates after each
request and it contains a list of all the "UP" server in the cluster.
This is how the HttpClusterServlet was learning of the other 4 machines. 
> 
> The solution was to use the weblogic plugin with apache etc and use apache
as the proxy / balancer. In the plugin configuration you can specify to disable
the Dynamic Server List with the parameters "DynamicServerList  OFF".
This mean the instance of apache only ever tries to communicate with the servers
you specify in the weblogiccluster parameter and it ignores the Dynamic Server
List returned from the cluster.

Its been a while since I configured this kind of thing, but do you not 
need 3 clusters - UK, US & Sweden?

Each of the 3 clusters would have it's own cluster address and only know 
about the two servers in it.

The load balancer could then be configured to use US cluster and fail 
over to the other cluster in the event of a failure.

I reckon, if the servers were all in the same cluster, even though you 
specify a list of servers in the load balancer, that as they are all 
chatting together with multicast, that this is where you started having 
problems with it not working.

Just thinking this through - if you have 3 clusters, that presents 
another problem (apart from deployment), as where do you want the backup 
session information stored - if you have a US/UK/SWE cluster, then 
session info will only be stored in each of the 3 regions.

Actually - with your apache solution, does session fail-over work ok? 
I'm not sure it would in all cases as you've manually stopped the plugin 
  keeping track of all servers in the cluster.

Not sure if I've been any help,