Embodiments of a request failover mechanism may be used to failover requests from clients of server instances in a cluster to alternative server instances. One embodiment may use cluster-aware remote references that include the IIOP endpoints at which the application server instances forming the cluster listen to IIOP requests. Using a cluster-aware remote reference to an object on an application server instance, a request to the object may be failed-over to an alternate endpoint in the cluster when the primary endpoint is unreachable. In one embodiment, once a request for a referenced object is failed over to a new server instance, all the subsequent requests to that object will continue to go to the same server instance even if the original server instance becomes available. One embodiment may provide client-side IIOP request load balancing in clustered application server environments through a load balancer subsystem using the cluster-aware remote references.