About Load Balancing

It is a good practice to use load balancing for proxying requests from clients and routing them to engines running the appropriate component. Load balancing is achieved through mappings between relative URLs and components.

VirtualRouter

VirtualRouter is a load balancer of Silver Fabric, for HTTP-enabled components. An instance of VirtualRouter runs by default on each Silver Fabric broker and can also run externally. Additionally, VirtualRouter maintains HTTP Session mappings between clients and JBoss EAP servers by examining the standard JSESSIONID cookie. For more information about installing and using VirtualRouter, see the TIBCO Silver Fabric Installation Guide and TIBCO Silver Fabric Administration Guide.

Custom External Load Balancer

You can create a custom load balancer to distribute requests across your component. Accommodating the dynamic nature of Silver Fabric allocation requires a mechanism to update the routing list of the custom balancer when the Silver Fabric component allocation changes. Notification of component activation and deactivation events can occur in the following ways:

  • ServerHook events
  • SNMP traps
  • Web Service calls

Refer to the TIBCO Silver Fabric Cloud Administration Guide and TIBCO Silver Fabric Developer’s Guide for more information on configuring and using these methods.