JGroups

JGroups & Cloud issues when clustering the EAP 6 – AS 7

| Immanuel Sims

As announced this is the last post of our series about clustering of the Redhat EAP 6 and JBoss AS 7. The other posts of this series were

Overview

This post will dig deeper into the clustering mechanisms of the EAP 6 and JBoss AS 7. We will show different solutions to multicast problems you will get in most cloud networks as well as some other networks. Infinispan uses JGroups to do its cluster communication. Cluster communication here means multiple things: finding other cluster nodes, providing a reliable transfer, implementing multicast communication even if there is no IP multicast available, identifying dead cluster nodes and a little bit more. In fact JGroups is able to do a lot more but Infinispan does not need all of the opportunities JGroups offers. The upcoming HornetQ version 2.3 which will be included in the EAP 6.1 will use JGroups for server discovery too. This post will explain the basic principles of JGroups and how to configure it in different network setups, especially most cloud networks.

Continue reading →

Clustering in JBoss AS7/EAP 6

| Immanuel Sims

Overview

The ability to combine different servers to a cluster that hides its internal servers from the clients and offers a virtual platform for an application is important for enterprise applications. It can be used to provide

  • high scalability by adding cheap computational resources to the cluster on demand or
  • high availability by using a transparent failover that hides faults within single servers.

Usually high scalability limits high availability and vice versa, but it is also possible to get both. The JBoss application server can be configured to support both features.

This post is the first one of a series about clustering with the JBoss AS 7. Here, we focus on the basic concepts behind JBoss AS 7 clustering and show you how to setup a basic clustered environment with a simple Java EE application.

In the series, we concentrate on the JBoss AS 7 respectively the EAP 6, which is the Red Hat-supported version of the JBoss application server. Future posts will be about particular subsystems of the JBoss AS, such as HornetQ or Infinispan.

Continue reading →