The Pega 7 Platform can use any load balancer that supports “sticky sessions.” A sticky session provides a connection between a client and a specific node or JVM in the load balancer rotation.

There are state of the art hardware-,software-, virtual-, and cloud-based load balancer solutions available. The features of each load balancing solution should be evaluated in conjunction with the physical architecture, service level agreement objectives, and operational needs of your organization. It is recommended that organizations perform capacity planning to understand their current and future computational needs.

In addition to the ability to integrate with node/JVM monitoring and support fail over for crash recovery, features to consider include:

• Session Affinity (required)
• Ability to monitor and remove failing nodes/JVMs from load balancer rotation (required)
• Ability to disable a node/JVMs in the load balancer (required)
• Metric collection
• Security
• Redundancy
• Content compression offloading
• SSL encryption offloading
• Content caching and acceleration

See the High Availability Administration Guide for more details.

Load-balancing software vendors and manufacturers

• F5 Networks Big IP: www.f5.com
• Cisco Content Services: www.cisco.com
• Microsoft ISA server: www.microsoft.com
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/