Workload management optimizes the distribution of client processing tasks. Incoming work requests are distributed to the application servers, enterprise beans, servlets, and other objects that can most effectively process the requests. Workload management also provides failover when servers are not available, improving application availability.

Workload management provides the following benefits to WebSphere Application Server applications:

• It balances client workloads, allowing processing tasks to be distributed according to the capacities of the different machines in the system.

• It provides failover capability by redirecting client requests if one or more servers is unable to process them. This improves the availability of applications and administrative services.

• It enables systems to be scaled up to serve a higher client load than provided by the basic configuration. With clustering, additional instances of servers, servlets, and other objects can easily be added to the configuration.

• It enables servers to be transparently maintained and upgraded while applications remain available for users.

• It centralizes the administration of servers and other objects.

In the WebSphere Application Server environment, you implement workload management by using...

• clusters
• transports
• replication domains

Related concepts

Related tasks