I used to think that server farm is from management point of view (start/stop, deploy, monitor, etc.), and server cluster is from runtime point of view (fail-over, load-balancing, etc.). But after a little search, it seems that many people regard them as the same thing. Some people also has an interesting distinguishing between them. e.g, [1] classifies clusters into server farm and server pack. A farm "shares the same applications and services but do not share the same repository of data", while a pack shares the data too.
-Jack [1] http://www.certmag.com/read.php?in=1477 On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Rex Wang <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks! So IIUC, farm provide system Load balancing, while Cluster add the > ability of failover, is that right?:-) > > -Rex > > 2009/7/9 Gianny Damour <[email protected]> > > I would say the other way around. A cluster is a type of farm. >> >> I see a farm as a set of independent instances. I see a cluster as a set >> of collaborating instances. You can deploy a non clustered application to a >> farm whereby you do not have resilience in case of service failure. And you >> can deploy a clustered application to a farm to increase service resiliency >> if necessary. >> >> Thanks, >> Gianny >> >> >> On 09/07/2009, at 12:49 PM, Rex Wang wrote: >> >> well, Gianny, is a server farm not a type of cluster? >>> >>> -Rex >>> >>> 2009/7/8 Gianny Damour <[email protected]> >>> Hi, >>> >>> It seems to me that farmName would be better than farmingClusterName as >>> there is a clear distinction between a farm and a cluster. >>> >>> Thanks, >>> Gianny >>> >>> >>> On 06/07/2009, at 7:47 PM, chi runhua wrote: >>> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> I just noticed there are 2 pairs of clusterName=CLUSTER_NAME in >>> config-substitions.properties. My understanding of them is one for WADI >>> clustering and another for farming. >>> >>> Can we using different keywords to identify them? ie. farmingClusterName >>> and WADIClusterName or sth. like that. >>> >>> >>> Jeff C >>> >>> >>> >> >
