A Thought a Day ...: Kedar Mhaswade's Weblog

I think there is some confusion in this regard. I think I must clarify certain things here. This post is about which distributions of Sun's application server have clustering support "out-of-the-box".

Simple answer: ALL .

Long Answer:

Following distributions of application server all have clustering support built into them:

• Of course, the GlassFish V2 download.
• The PE distribution, YES, PE has clustering support.
• The EE distribution.
• The Java EE SDK Update 3 distribution.

The reason this is possible is because the core application server code base is exactly the same in all the distributions. It is the various other 3PP (third party products) that differ. For example, the SDK bundle (it has different official name, check out http://java.sun.com/javaee for details) has other software like access manager and portal server support, whereas the EE bundle has HADB to store the state and has NSS and Load-balancer plugin among other things.

The features that enable this (amazing, IMO) feat are:

• In-memory replication of conversational state.
• Usage Profiles.
• IIOP failover.

So, next time you need clustering support, don't look for EE, PE, SDK and GlassFish builds do the job. I will post more in this regard soon ...