Patent ID: 6963917

Claim:
A method of 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, the method comprising: 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; receiving a request for a connection to the application over the network; determining if the received request has a characteristic other than identification of the application corresponding to the at least one predefined characteristic associated with the subset of the plurality of data processing systems; and distributing the received request to one of the subset of the plurality of data processing systems if the received request is for a connection to the application over the network and has a characteristic corresponding to the at least one predefined characteristic.