Resource Workload Routing in WebSphere Application Server 8

WebSphere Application Server V8 adds improved high availability (HA) support in several scenarios, including:

• Resource failover and retry logic for relational data sources and JCA connection factories, where the administrator can tailor the data sources and connection factory configuration based on application need to specify:
  • Number of connection retries.
  • Alternate/fail-over resource.
  • Pre-population of alternate/fail-over resource connection pool.

Resource Workload Routing is a new feature exclusive to the WebSphere Application Server that enables applications to easily recover from resource outages, such as database failures, without requiring you to embed alternate resource and configuration information.

Resource workload routing includes data source and connection factory fail over and subsequent fail back from a predefined alternate or backup resource. You can tailor the resource fail over and failback flexible configuration options to meet your environment-specific and application needs.new

On distributed systems, you can enable resource routing by configuring an alternate resource.
A data source and connection factory can fail over and fail back automatically when a specified or default failure threshold value is reached. When fail over occurs, the application switches from using the primary resource to using the alternate resource. Fail back occurs when the application switches back from the alternate resource to the primary resource.


Implementers of Resource Adapters take note - Fail over works with non-relational resource adapters that have a ManagedConnection object that implements a testConnection method.

Instead of rolling your own architecture and policy for outbound resource fail over please leverage this  in-built resource routing High Availability function to prevent disruption to end users.