Chapter 7: WebSphere Failover and High Availability Considerations

Overview

In this chapter, you'll dive into high availability configuration and considerations associated with WebSphere implementations . You'll explore what is possible in terms of failover and high availability with WebSphere and expand on what you learned in Chapters 5 and 6.

Over the past two major releases of WebSphere (i.e., versions 4 and 5), WebSphere has come a long way in the areas of high availability and failover. It's quite possible to configure a WebSphere application environment to be 99.99 percent (or higher) available within a reasonable budget on commodity hardware.

In Chapters 5 and 6 you looked at topological architectures and best practices for selection of platforms and platform designs that foster high availability. In this chapter, you'll delve further into high availability and WebSphere, and you'll be provided with the context you'll need to design a WebSphere environment which ensures high levels of availability.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Failover and high availability fundamentals

• Disaster recovery

• Clustering

• Web server failover configurations

• Web container failover configurations

• EJB container failover configurations

• Database server failover configurations

By the end of this chapter, you should have a good understanding of WebSphere's high availability and failover features and be in a position to architect and configure your platform to provide maximum uptime for your customers and users.