The design we are trying to implement has a couple of load balanced tomcats in the DMZ talking to a couple of clustered JBoss 4.02 servers on the backend. What I am a bit lost on is setting up the jndi on the tomcats to communicate with JBoss and have everything load balanced with failover.

Is my understanding correct that if I do not provide a provider url then the client will auto discover the jboss cluster? Is there a performance penalty for doing things this way? Will access to the jboss cluster be load balanced?

If anyone can comment on this or point me to some pertinent docs I would really appreciate it ( yes, I have been reading the manual )

thank you