Configuring WebSphere proxy server for load balancing in a Sametime Gateway cluster

To best support high availability and provide failover services, a cluster of IBM® Sametime® Gateway Servers should be fronted with at least two IBM WebSphere® proxy servers and IBM Load Balancer.

About this task

In a Sametime deployment, you can configure multiple Sametime Gateway Servers into clusters to provide high availability of resources. Each cluster of Sametime Gateway Servers must be fronted with at least one WebSphere proxy server to process client requests; however, you should deploy at least two proxy servers plus a load balancer (IBM Load Balancer is included in the Sametime kit) to ensure that the workload is distributed equitably among the back-end servers. If a back-end server is unavailable this configuration additionally allows for connections to fail over to other servers in the cluster.

When you deploy proxy servers and a load balancer in front of a cluster, you provide a single IP address (the load balancer's address, known as the "cluster address") for all external communities; their requests are handled by the load balancer, which distributes them among the available proxy servers to balance the workload. The proxy servers forward the requests to the clustered servers on the back-end.

In a highly available Sametime Gateway deployment with a load balancer, use the instructions in this section to configure the load balance for either MAC forwarding or IP forwarding.