We are going to run WebSphere on Linux for some new applications and would like to put the WebSphere server in cluster. I know that WebSphere Network Development has clustering capabilities, but in our case, WebSphere Express would probably be enough. Do you see any problem in using an OS-level cluster system?
One customer we worked with compared WebSphere clustering to using a simple Apache HTTP server that spread the workload across multiple systems and WebSphere instances. Since their applications already had transaction integrity built-in, there wasn't any reason to use WebSphere clustering. Performance was at least as good as the WebSphere cluster.
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There is a problem with the expert's answer: how does Apache HTTP server cope with session problem in a cluster?
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This was first published in September 2004