Jboss High Availability Architecture

[dcheida]

Greetings,

I'm currently working at a critical Java web application that requires a highly available environment, so after many researchs I decide to use JBoss AS 7 configured as a load balanced cluster to get there.

I need the cluster to have real high availability, so the load balancer can't be a single point of failure (such as using Apache mod_proxy_cluster). It is possible to distribute the load balancing across the cluster nodes ? This would be similar to Windows Network Load Balancer, who uses a virtual IP to get the external requests. Doed JBoss Virtual Host can be used for it ?

Thanks in advance.

Daniel Cheida

[rhusar]

Hi Daniel,

so after many researchs I decide to use JBoss AS 7 configured as a load balanced cluster to get there.

Great choice!

so the load balancer can't be a single point of failure

Yes, so you do need to cluster load balancers as well.

It is possible to distribute the load balancing across the cluster nodes ?

In such architecture you would need to deploy a loadbalancer on everynode as well.

Even though this is doable I would rather have dedicated machines in front of the cluster. So that the cluster is isolated from the outside and only requests via Apache and AJP get all the way to the cluster.

Windows Network Load Balancer, who uses a virtual IP to get the external requests

No idea what that is, but its probably solves the problem above ^ by having each machine have private and public interfaces where JBoss AS is only visible on the private. Yes, this is douable as well, but its more matter of the OS level configuration rather than JBoss (you just need to bind jboss to the correct address).

HTH,

Rado