Disclosed are systems and methods which provide high availability with respect to equipment deployed in a distributed system architecture. The distributed system architecture may comprise one or more equipment clusters of a plurality of processor-based systems cooperating to host one or more application servers. Redundancy is provided with respect to equipment of the equipment clusters to provide high availability with respect to equipment used in providing services of the application servers as well as to provide continuity of applications provided by the application servers. Various equipment elements of an equipment cluster may be provided different levels and/or types of redundancy. Other equipment elements of an equipment cluster may be provided different levels and/or types of redundancy. Equipment elements may operate to assign sessions to particular equipment elements for load balancing