Tomcat in a cluster respecting jsessionid

[johndesp]

We have been asked to deploy a technology that runs tomcat. The
technoloy uses jsessionid as a means of mainting authentication state.
we are deploying in a multiple web server cluster configuration to
provide high availability. We normally deploy with WebSphere, in
which we persist session data back to a database server through
standard Websphere persitent sessions capabilities.

When we activate more than one tomcat server in the new web
configuration, we notice we can quickly begin to see http 401s being
raised by other members of the cluster. Also, we see these other
members reset the jsessionid if the discover they can't respect or
find it in memory.

Can Tomcat be configured in a cluster? If so, what is the mechanism
to persist jsessionid objects? Would url rewriting work?

Thanks