---
title:  Server Locators
---

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Server locators continuously monitor server availability and server load information. The client is configured with a list of server locators and consults a server locator to request a connection to a server in the distributed system.

Locators provide clients with dynamic server discovery and server load balancing. They give clients connection information for the server with the least load at any given time.

Server locators provide these main features:

-   **Automated discovery of servers and locators**. Adding and removing servers or locators is made easy as each client does not require a list of servers to be configured at the time of pool creation.
-   **Client load rebalancing**. Server locators give clients dynamic server information and provide server load rebalancing after servers depart or join the system.
-   **High availability**. When a client/server connection receives an exception, the connection is automatically failed over to another available connection in the pool. Redundancy is also provided for client subscriptions.

Alternatively, you can configure a pool statically with a list of endpoints. When the pools are statically configured, a round-robin load balancing policy is used to distribute connections across the servers.