Welcome to Clusters
Clusters are groups of servers that are managed together and participate in workload management. A cluster can contain nodes or individual appservers. A node is usually a physical computer system with a distinct host IP address that is running one or more application servers. Clusters can be grouped under the configuration of a cell, which logically associates many servers and clusters with different configurations and applications with one another depending on the discretion of the administrator and what makes sense in their organizational environments.
Clusters are responsible for balancing workload among servers. Servers that are a part of a cluster are called cluster members. When you install an application on a cluster, the application is automatically installed on each cluster member.
Because each cluster member contains the same applications, you can distribute client tasks according to the capacities of the different machines by assigning weights to each server.
Assigning weights to the servers in a cluster improves performance and failover. Tasks are assigned to servers that have the capacity to perform the task operations. If one server is unavailable to perform the task, it is assigned to another cluster member. This has obvious advantage over running a single appserver that can become overloaded if too many requests are made.
To learn more about clusters, see Clusters and workload management and Balancing workloads with clusters for more information.
Clusters and workload management
Balancing workloads with clusters