The basics of load balancing and clustering with Liferay

Load balancing is a technique to distribute load on multiple systems. In the previous chapter, we talked about the reference architecture of Liferay-Portal-based solutions. In our reference architecture, we referred to two levels of load balancing. The first level of load balancing is done by the hardware load balancer. The hardware load balancer distributes load among Apache Web Servers. As hardware load balancing is very specific to the load balancer appliance, we will not cover it in this book. The second level of load balancing is done by Apache web servers. Each Apache web server performs the role of software load balancer and distributes load among Liferay Portal application servers. In this chapter, we will focus on Apache Web Server based software load balancing.

To learn best practices associated with load balancing and clustering of Liferay-Portal-based solutions, we need to know how to configure the load balancer and cluster...