Disabling (Quiescing) a Server Instance or Cluster

Before stopping an application server for any reason, the instance should complete serving requests. The process of gracefully disabling a server instance or cluster is called quiescing.

The load balancer uses the following policy for quiescing application server instances:

• If an instance (either stand-alone or part of a cluster) is disabled, and the timeout has not expired, sticky requests continue to be delivered to that instance. New requests, however, are not sent to the disabled instance.

• When the timeout expires, the instance is disabled. All open connections from the load balancer to the instance are closed. The load balancer does not send any requests to this instance, even if all sessions sticking to this instance were not invalidated. Instead, the load balancer fails over sticky requests to another healthy instance.

To disable a server instance or cluster

1. Run asadmin disable-http-lb-server, setting the timeout (in minutes). For more information on the command, see disable-http-lb-server(1).

2. Export the load balancer configuration file using asadmin export-http-lb-config. For more information on the command, see export-http-lb-config(1).

3. Copy the exported configuration to the web server config directory.

4. Stop the server instance or instances.