Port balancing on WAS 7.0 Express

Hi All,

We currently have an IBM i running JDE E9.0 (9.1.0.4) with WAS Express 7.0. I set up several J2EE Web server containers for each of our environments on the same IBM i. It works great. I'm led to believe that the recommended number of users per JVM is about 100 but I'm thinking that it should be lower, perhaps in the 60 users per JVM region or even less. To cater for this limitation, I created additional servers but with different ports pointing to the same environment (for e.g. PD900WEB10010, PD900WEB10011, and PD900WEB10012). With this in mind, I wanted to know if there was a tool out there that would allow us to point the users to a single front-end URL address that would "load-balance" to the different "ports". For example, if a region had 200 users, getting them to point their browsers to 1 URL instead of getting the first 100 users to connect to port 10010, the second 100 users to connect to port 10011 and so on. How are other folks doing it it out there?

I read a post that spoke of WAS ND and clustering/load balancing but I wanted to know if there was another way to get around this. Again, this is a All-in-one IBM i. I hope this makes sense.

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated. Thank you very much for your assistance.

Kind regards,
Misael

JDE E9.0 with TR 9.1.0.4 running on IBM i V6R1 with WAS Express 7.0

Hi,

As you said, this kind of tool would be round-robin port, which should be found in proxy tools. I have not the answer you're seeking, sorry, but I have question you may need to answer to get the correct direction.

First, it seems you're full i series. At first that was our design. We then switched the web server outside using an x86 and WebSphere. And now we are testing to switch the enterprise server outside the i with a Windows 2008 R2. The purpose is :
1) performance issue because everything on the same machine forbid to load balance ressources (or to upgrade parts like adding memory on a web server)
2) recovery issue because it's not as easy as in vmware to manage an i
3) cost of everything because the great asset in AS400 is the database and maybe the specific written on it, that's why we're trying to keep that part and lower the hardware needs for i

For sure in add complexity to the system. But I suppose you already have to manage multiple system pool. And now for example, we are free to decide to add 3 enteprise servers in different time zones without interrupting the main one.

Second is as you said : WebSphere ND. We use that and it does what you describe. For production we have 5 different application servers all connected to the same web server and the load abalancing is automatic. Furthermore, Server Manager is able to see how many user are connected on each JAS. And if there is a failure on one JAS, when stopping it, the system violently drop the user connect only on this JAS. And when reconnecting, there n-1 JAS available but it still works transparently.

In performance tuning guide, Oracle said that for heavily loaded web server, the IHS should be separated from the JAS server. That won't be possible with everything on i ?

In the cluster documentation, they also talk about having one IHS server and multiple JAS server on multiple WebSphere server. This should be the ultimate form of clustering (both vertical and horizontal) and we didn't test it yet.

The only advantage I've seen is that WebSphere on i is fast. I didn't benchmark it with our separated infrastructure because it was not on the same version of TR and application. But you can easyly add a WebSphere on x86 and test it without changing anything in your setup.

Regards,

Hi Eldertoon.

Thank you very much for taking the time out to respond. I really appreciate your comments.

Yes we are running All-in-one on i as you rightly stated. At first WAS was very slow on the i so we moved the web component onto a Win2008 R2 server to begin our testing. We then found a solution to the slow response times on the i and moved everything back onto the i. I agree that it may be better to have resources spread across multiple servers. We are currently in a semi-live environment and the user base is very small. If the performance gets really bad, we will probably move the web servers onto Windows as you have done.

We priced WAS ND for a 8 core processor on i and it was in the region of $100k which is crazy if JDE can do the job running on WAS Express with the exception of not being able to cluster the web servers.

We have a NetScaler solution in the organization so we're going to attempt to see if this can help us in what we're trying to achieve. If all else fails, we will just give the first 100 users the URL for the first port and the next 100 users, the URL for the second port and so on.

Thank you once again for your time.

Kind regards.
Misael

also - check out my presentation on the Zen LoadBalancer solution - which is fast becoming the cheap alternative method for load balancing instead of using a hardware based solution :

http://www.jdelist.com/ubb/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=176645

Hello Misael,

A late reply to your post but you may want to check out this white paper:
http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP102141

- Clark
White Paper on WAS Express Load Balancing