Clustered 8.1, EJBs, and localhost

Question

Howdy all. We're running Weblogic 8.1 for a Vignette V7 CMS installation. Our production tier is clustered Solaris servers. We use Resonate Central Dispatch for user-end load balancing of http requests. This has been working fine so far.
          So we have some EJB applications we're preparing to deploy across the cluster. They have a config file containing the t3 URL they need to connect to. Well, our front-end load balancer won't do t3, so we can't put the cluster name/IP in the URL the app uses for the EJBs. And you can't put the individual box name/IPs themselves, since the same config is replicated across all servers. So I figured, why not use localhost... But we determined that wasn't working, and upon looking at the WebLogic clustering documentation I see that's deliberate.
          We have the server set to listen to the cluster IP. It appears that you can connect to it t3 via either the cluster IP or the individual box's IP. How can I get it to listen to localhost while still listening to those addresses, or is there another brilliant solution to this problem?
          Thanks,
          Ernest

Answer 1

Ernest Mueller <> writes:
          > Resonate is a software load balancer. It creates a local loopback
          > adapter on each server with the cluster's IP on it. So the software
          > on each box should listen to the cluster IP instead of the
          > individual server IP. There's only one cluster IP. That's set up
          > and working correctly.
          I'm still not following. The IP used for the listen address is crucial
          to server identity. If you have servers in a cluster listening on the
          same IP and port you are going to have problems regardless of whether
          it looks like its working. Most load-balancers that I know of map a
          single virtual IP to multiple real IPs which are the addresses the
          servers are actually listening on. I suspect that we are just talking
          at cross purposes.
          > Because we have an app that needs to connect back to itself, it
          > needs to contact "localhost". We're dealing with a third party
          > library where you supply the t3 URL to connect to in a XML
          > properties file. So we need an URL that, to WebLogic, will mean
          > "connect back to myself please." Localhost is the usual means of
          > achieving that.
          Ok, so network channels will give you this. You could also just leave
          out the URL (at least the address part), that will cause an internal
          collocated connection to be made.
          > I don't know what you mean by not being able to load balance t3; an
          > individual connection doesn't get moved, but subsequent connections
          > will be assigned a low-load server.
          Right, that's what I mean. Some customers expect to be able to load
          balance per-request like you can with http.
          andy