Load balancing and farming

You can use load balancers to manage client requests across all of the nodes in a Content Cortex server farm.

Farming requires a mechanism to balance the load across all the nodes in a farm, and to redirect client connections to surviving nodes in case of failure. This section summarizes the available load balancing options.

A number of hardware and software load-balancing products are available for server farm configurations, including IBM®, Oracle, and F5 Big IP.

Table 1. Tested load-balancing/farming solutions
Vendor More information
Oracle WebLogic Server clusters -
F5 Big IP -
IBM WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment clusters Formerly called server group of clones.
Important: Layer 7 load balancers are supported in Content Cortex, but the header or packet modification capabilities of layer 7 load balancers have not been tested and should be used with caution.
  • WebSphere Application Server and WebLogic Server

    Content Platform Engine is hosted on a Java™ application server. Both the Oracle and IBM Java application servers have built-in capabilities for providing highly available web services. Each application server product is capable of configuring a collection of server instances that function as a single entity in order to provide an application to a user. Both Oracle WebLogic Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server calls this collection of server instances a Cluster. Both products function like a server farm.