Guidelines for vertical and horizontal clustering

Please follow these guidelines while deciding about using either Vertical or horizontal clustering

Vertical clustering
To fully utilize the processing power of modern SMP servers
Local redundancy

Horizontal cluster
To achieve scalability beyond the limitation of individual server
Reduandancy and reliability
Hardware failover

Horizontal scaling is especially effective in environments that contain many smaller, less powerful machines. Client requests that would overwhelm a single small machine can be distributed over several machines in the solution. Failover is another benefit of horizontal scaling. If a machine becomes unavailable, its work can be routed to other machines
containing cluster members.


By contrast, vertical cloning benefits Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) systems and should be implemented when system resources are found to be underutilized. For Java, systems with multiple processors typically outperform multiple systems with fewer processors, when comparing the total number of processors.

A general rule of thumb has always been to allocate a single Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to a single processor. Traditionally, this was based on the constraint that the compaction phase of Garbage Collection (GC) was single threaded. Recent versions of the JVM have, however, minimized this restriction, potentially allowing a greater number of JVMs to run given the total number of available processors. It is also worth remembering that there are a number of JVMs associated with the Deployment Manager and NodeAgent (a NodeAgent is required for each individual physical node participating in the cell) when running Portal Server V6.0.1 in a clustered environment.

It is highly recommended to use combination of horizontal and vertical clustering to make full use of the system resources and still making sure that system is fault tolerent if one of the server hardware fails