WebSphere Commerce EnterpriseWebSphere Commerce Professional

Clustering with vertical cluster members

After you federate your WebSphere Commerce environment, you can configure vertical clustering. Clustering provides failover protection and provides workload balancing.

Before you begin

  • Complete the installation of a WebSphere Commerce node using the custom install option of the installation wizard.
  • Create a WebSphere Commerce instance.
  • Before clustering a WebSphere Commerce instance, it strongly recommended that you backup the WebSphere Application Server administrative configuration. Backing up the administrative configuration will allow you to restore the original configuration if clustering fails during the clustering process. For more information, see Backing up and recovering the application server environment.

About this task

Clustering with vertical cluster members refers to the practice of defining cluster members of an application server on the same physical machine. Experience has shown that a single application server, which is implemented by a single JVM process, cannot always fully utilize the processor power and RAM of a large multiprocessor machine. Clustering with vertical cluster members provides a straightforward mechanism to create multiple JVM processes, that together can fully use all the processing power and memory available.

Procedure

  1. Federate the WebSphere Commerce node into a deployment manager cell.
  2. Create a WebSphere Commerce Cluster.
  3. Add additional cluster members.
  4. Starting and stopping quick reference.
  5. Open the WebSphere Integrated Solutions Console.
  6. Create an Internal Replication Domain for your application:
    Note: It is possible to create this as part of the initial cluster setup. If you have already created a Replication Domain for your application, you can use the existing one.
    1. Click Environment > Replication domains > New.
    2. Fill in the required fields. For Number of replicas, select Entire Domain. Save the changes.
  7. Enable cache replication in each cluster member.
    1. Click Servers > Application servers > Cluster Member Name > Container Services > Dynamic Cache Service.
    2. To enable replication, select Enable Cache Replication.
    3. Choose a replication domain.
    4. Choose a replication type. For WebSphere Commerce, the recommendation is to use Not shared. For other options, see Dynamic cache service settings.
      Note: With the Not shared replication type, invalidations are sent without replicating content.
    5. Repeat steps a-d for each cluster member.
    6. Save your changes.
  8. Ensure the replication domain and replication type of all out of box DistributedMap object caches are specified.
    1. Open the WebSphere Application Server Integrated Solutions Console.
    2. From the left menu, click Resources > Cache instances > Object cache instances.
  9. Ensure the replication domain and replication type of 1 (notShared) is specified for all the object caches defined in the Stores.war/classes/cacheinstances.properties file. At least the object cache with JNDI name services/cache/WCSessionDistributedMapCache must be defined. For more information, see Enabling WebSphere Commerce data cache
  10. Instead of using a default setting, always explicitly specify the replication mode for each entry in cachespec.xml.
    For example:
    • Add <sharing-policy>shared-push</sharing-policy> to each cache-entry in cachespec.xml.
      Note: You can choose not to replicate certain cache entries. To configure a cache entry to not replicate, set <sharing-policy>not-shared</sharing-policy>. See the cachespec.xml.

      For more information, see Cache replication.

  11. Regenerate the Web server plug-in and copy the plug-in to the web server.
  12. Start the WebSphere Commerce cluster.