No downtime For Application Migration in Weblogic 8.1 sp2

We are performing frequent application migrations which results in long or extended downtime . Our setup runs on Weblogic 8.1 sp2 cluster nodes and our application is a mission critical application which should not have such downtimes.

Our current application is developed using Java 1.4.2.

Is it possible in any way with Weblogic 8.1 sp2 to have migrations/deploy开发者_开发百科ments without any downtime.

Regards, NZ

Since WebLogic 8.1 doesn't have the side-by-side deployment option, you could:

1) Use external staging for your deployments and copy the new artifacts over to the directory and perform a restart of the application server instead of doing the application deployment manually from the console. However, a manual deployment is required whenever the modules within the artifact change.

2) Split up your environment to have 2 Clusters instead of one. However, this comes with the overhead of fragmenting your environment and based off of your current architecture, skewing your load balancing / fail-over capabilities.

In addition to side-by-side deployments, the newer versions have support for server/service level migration but I'm assuming upgrading isn't an option at this point.