URGENT - Clustering without multicast

[lords_diakonos]

I am wondering if it is possible to cluster Jboss Cache without using multicast traffic. I am running on Amazon EC2 and they don't support multicast.

I kind of need to solve this.

[manik]

We haven't got a tried and tested clustering service on EC2 as yet, but you could try using TCP in JGroups, instead of UDP. Have a look at the JGroups website, there are docs and sample configs for using TCP instead of UDP.

[manakhan]

we've had very good luck with TCP clustering in production and in EC2 (which we use for dev and load testing) ... perf in EC2 seems to be more network bound, with sustained throughput topping out at 250 megabits for XL instances ... don't bother with the smaller instances as the bandwidth is less and the latency is higher. For 4 node clusters we were able to achieve roughly 90% of equivalent performance on real hardware (dual quad core at 2.0 GHz with 16 GB RAM) on EC2, though your mileage may vary. Overall, TCP is ok up to 8 node clusters n our experience (assuming gigabit) for read intensive apps. One other thing we did is to have dedicated bonded nics for the clustering traffic separate from client request traffic nics, and load balanced the VIPs across both the front and back planes. Hope this helps.

[manik]

Thanks for sharing, I'm sure this will help others trying to deploy JBC on EC2.

[neillturner]

Do you have a sample custer_service.xml for amazon ec2 using tcp clustering?

[brian.stansberry]

Bob McWhirter's doing lots of stuff related to running JBoss on the cloud. Have a look at http://oddthesis.org/theses/jboss-cloud

In particular, the presentation he gave at JBoss Virtual Experience covers some of this stuff beginning on slide 37. Link to blog post where you can get the presentation:

http://oddthesis.org/posts/2009-01-jboss-virtual-experience-presentation-slides