Notes 6 Clustering & Load Balancing

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I am a developer with pretty good basic admin skills but…

I am looking for information about Clustering and Load balancing in Domino 6. Specifically, how transparent is fail-over support, are there any development/code issues to be taken into consideration… etc.

I would appreciate any information, or pointers…

Many Thanks

Neil

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Subject: Thanks to Everyone

I will look at the redbook, and I was wondering about agents, perhaps for manual agents that run on a server I can pass the server name or something… Not sure about scheduled agents will have a look.

Thanks for the information

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Subject: Notes 6 Clustering & Load Balancing

One item to keep in mind is agents. You may need to recode them to check which server they are running on.

Imagine you have an agent that is scheduled to run on Server A, that should update documents. However, Server A is no longer available. Users are failed over to Server B, and the agent attempts to run, but cannot, because Server A down. If the requirement for the agent to run is based on some user action, you may have some issues.

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Subject: Notes 6 Clustering & Load Balancing

You can start with this redbook: SG245141

I have implemented clustering with 2 servers at one client, and it works well. You will need seperate network cards for the cluster transaction and that can become tricky. Fail-over is very transparent, only if you pay close attention do you see the messages at the bottom telling you that one server failed and that it is looking for another. Sometimes some users say that after a failover, some mail is not there anymore, but this is rare.

I don’t know if you necessarely need to do special coding for a failover, you would only loose new unsaved documents. If this is critical, I would let users work on a local copy of the database, then when a document is saved, send it to the server database, then it does not matter to which server it goes to.

If you can’t get the redbook, send me an email and I will attach it.

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Subject: RE: Notes 6 Clustering & Load Balancing

How well does fail-over work with regard to internet users (browsers) ?

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Subject: RE: Notes 6 Clustering & Load Balancing

I believe you need to implement additional hardware/software for the internet fail over and load balancing. We had IBMs Edge Server recommended to us (by IMB of course) but have not yet set it up.