Patent ID: 7085831

Claim:
A method of operating a software control agent, comprising: automatically selecting based upon a predetermined criterion one of a plurality of clients to submit the user request to for service of the request, each client comprising a plurality of queue types, each queue type having an individual scheme for prioritizing jobs; sending the user request over a communication channel to the selected client; instructing the agent to relocate to a known agent endpoint by a system administrator; stopping to accept new job requests by the agent; waiting for pending/current request relocations to finish by the agent; flushing in-process requests to a state storage system by the agent; requesting the new endpoint to instantiate a new agent by the agent; waiting while the new agent populates its database with the data from the state storage system by the agent; sending a message to all federated agents that the agent for a domain is relocated to the new agent by a first agent; sending a message to all clients in the domain that the agent is relocated to the new agent by the first agent; and sending a request to the first agent's endpoint to close the first agent by the new agent.