LOAD BALANCING IN A NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

A method is provided for load balancing requests for an application among a plurality of instances of the application operating on a plurality of servers. A policy is selected for choosing a preferred server from the plurality of servers according to a specified status or operational characteristic of the application instances, such as the least-loaded instance or the instance with the fastest response time. The policy is encapsulated within multiple levels of objects or modules that are distributed among the servers offering the application and a central server that receives requests for the application. A first type of object, a status object, gathers or retrieves application-specific information concerning the specified status or operational characteristic of an instance of the application. Status objects interact with instances of the load-balanced application and are configured to store their collected information for retrieval by individual server monitor objects. An individual server monitor object illustratively operates for each server operating an instance of the application and retrieves the application-specific information from one or more status objects. A central replicated monitor object gathers the information from the individual server monitor objects. The information is then analyzed to select the server having the optimal status or operational characteristic. An update object updates the central server, such as a domain name server, to indicate the preferred server. Requests for the application are then directed to the preferred server until a different preferred server is identified.