Cluster JBoss ESB

[ingedeut]

Hi,

I would like to know if the following scenario is possible using JBoss ESB.

I want to setup a number of esb nodes (a cluster, perhaps?) with essentially the same set of services configured. An those services accessible as web services to components outside of JBoss ESB.

I imagine that for external clients which are not JBoss ESB aware and simply want to access a web service, an external load balancer would be required. Is this a correct assumption?

For JBoss ESB aware clients, is it possible to have JBoss ESB route the messages to services based on the load on a particular server?

Is it possible to manage individual services while the application server is running, for example, starting new services or stopping services? In this case, will ESB still route requests appropriately?

Considering UDDI integration, if I do have multiple services listed on different machines, would JBoss ESB list them all on UDDI, or would I need to list only one instance of a service at one IP address and use the load balancer to pick the actual host? Does the UDDI implementation within JBoss ESB support replication yet? Can I run UDDI on every host serving the same data?

Finally, when running WS-BPEL, it is possible to use UDDI to select the instance of a service that you want to run? If so, is there any way to get UDDI to provide responses based on the load of the hosts in a cluster, so less loaded hosts would be given in responses from UDDI?

I realize that these are somewhat obscure questions, but I believe that for ESB to be truly "enterprise", availability and load balancing concerns need to be considered.

Thanks and Regards,

[kconner]

Yes, this is certainly possible with the current codebase.

You would need to front it with a load balancer, for the initial HTTP request, but from then on it could be done using the technologies present in the ESB.  There are also some additional changes which can short circuit some of the work, helping to speed up the app.

I will be covering some of this during a BoF at next week's JBoss World, the presentations will be made available shortly afterwards.  I'll also be writing some blog entries to go through different aspects in more detail, again after JBoss World.

Kev