Using NGINX and NGINX Plus to Load Balance Oracle WebLogic Server

Oracle WebLogic Server is one of the world’s most popular enterprise-level Java EE platforms. The resilient, event-driven architecture of NGINX and NGINX Plus make them a reliable, scalable, and high-performance solution for effectively load balancing your WebLogic Server applications.

The open source NGINX software acts as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and content cache, as well as providing an extra layer of security and handling termination of SSL traffic for your WebLogic Server applications.

NGINX Plus builds on NGINX with advanced load‑balancing algorithms, application‑specific health checks, dynamic scalability with the on‑the‑fly reconfiguration API, and a live activity monitoring dashboard and API that provides valuable metrics about the traffic flowing through NGINX Plus.

To help customers get the most out of their WebLogic deployments, NGINX, Inc. has published a new deployment guide, Using NGINX and NGINX Plus to Load Balance Oracle WebLogic Server. This guide details how NGINX and NGINX Plus can be utilized as a load balancer and application delivery controller for Apache Tomcat application servers.

Why NGINX and NGINX Plus?

Load balancing HTTP traffic across multiple application instances is a commonly used technique for optimizing resource utilization, maximizing throughput, reducing latency, and ensuring fault-tolerant configurations. The ability of NGINX and NGINX Plus to scale and handle a large number of simultaneous connections using a very small memory footprint makes them a great choice to load balance your WebLogic Server application servers.

In addition to performance and scale, the open source NGINX software provides a number of benefits for WebLogic Server applications:

Event-driven architecture – NGINX provides much greater scalability and resilience to traffic spikes and DOS attacks than WebLogic Server offers on its own.
SPDY and HTTP/2 support – NGINX supports both the SPDY and HTTP/2 protocols, which offer improved performance over HTTP/1.1.
Load balancing – The variety of load balancing algorithms in NGINX enable you to scale out your WebLogic Server applications as well as maintain high availability.
TLS/SSL termination – NGINX can terminate TLS/SSL connections to offload that work from WebLogic Server application servers.
Caching – NGINX acts as a highly capable cache for both static and dynamic content, which greatly improves application performance.

And NGINX Plus, the enhanced and commercially supported product, builds on NGINX with additional enterprise-ready features:

Application health checks – NGINX Plus proactively monitors WebLogic Server application servers and stops sending requests to unhealthy servers.
Session persistence – NGINX Plus leverages the JSESSIONID cookie to ensure that a user’s requests are forwarded to the same WebLogic Server application server every time.
On-the-fly reconfiguration of load-balanced servers – You can reconfigure load-balanced server groups on the fly using the Domain Name System (DNS) or a simple HTTP API.
Live activity monitoring – NGINX Plus has a real-time activity monitoring interface that provides key load and performance metrics.

How Do I Get Started?

To get started using NGINX and NGINX Plus with WebLogic Server application servers, download the new deployment guide developed by NGINX, Inc. It provides step-by-step instructions configuring NGINX and NGINX Plus to efficiently load balance and scale your servers. Configuration files for basic and enhanced load balancing are also available so you don’t have to cut and paste from the guide.

Experienced with WebLogic Server but new to NGINX Plus? Take advantage of our 30-day free trial or contact us for a live demo, and see for yourself how NGINX Plus can boost the performance and manageability of your WebLogic Server applications.