When configuring the Listen Address value with a hostname as in the previous recipes, WebLogic Server instances use the specific network interface card (NIC) bound to the hostname's IP address for network traffic. The traffic includes all inbound and outbound requests and the Unicast cluster communications.

In a production environment with high network traffic, it is possible to improve network utilization by adding an additional NIC to be used by the Unicast cluster communications, segregating the application traffic, and the cluster communication traffic.

This recipe will create a new channel named clusterChannel and configure the PROD_Cluster cluster to use it.