Methods, systems and computer program products for policy based distribution of workload to subsets of potential servers

摘要

Methods, systems and computer program products according to embodiments of the present invention provide distributing workload between a plurality of data processing systems in a cluster of data processing systems, wherein each of the plurality of data processing systems is executing an instance of an application which communicates over a network such that a connection request to the application may be distributed to any one of the plurality of data processing systems. Such workload distribution may be provided by defining a subset of the plurality of data processing systems which are to receive connection requests to the application having at least one predefined characteristic. A request for a connection to the application is received over the network and it is determined if the request has a characteristic corresponding to the characteristic associated with the subset of the plurality of data processing systems. The request is distributed to a data processing system in the subset of the plurality of data processing systems if the request has a characteristic corresponding to the predefined characteristic.