Which is best Jboss EAP6.1 configuration when we are having Apache as a front tier in production ?

[arun2arunraj]

Hi,

We are having Apache as our front end to our applications. We are having JBoss EAP 6.1.1GA, Apache 2.2.15 and Modcluster 1.2.4 Final. We configured clusters with the above products.  But having no idea whether we are using best industry practice configurations for our applications. Any Help is much appreciated.

Apache configurations

Listen IPADDRESS:7777

Maxhost 1000

Maxnode 1000

<IfModule manager_module>

   <VirtualHost IPADDRESS:7777>

     ManagerBalancerName servicelb

    ServerName IPADDRESS

      <Location />

            Order deny,allow

            Allow from all

      </Location>

      KeepAliveTimeout 300

      MaxKeepAliveRequests 0

      EnableMCPMReceive

      AllowDisplay On

      <Location /mod_cluster_manager>

            SetHandler mod_cluster-manager

            Order deny,allow

            Deny from all

            Allow from *.domain.com

     </Location>

     <Location /server_status>

            SetHandler server-status

            Order deny,allow

            Deny from all

            Allow from *.domain.com

     </Location>

  </VirtualHost>

</IfModule>

Jboss mod-cluster Configurations

            <subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:modcluster:1.1">

                <mod-cluster-config advertise-socket="modcluster" proxy-list="${modcluster.proxylist}" advertise="false" excluded-contexts="invoker,jbossws,juddi,console"  connector="ajp">

                    <dynamic-load-provider>

                        <load-metric type="busyness"/>

                    </dynamic-load-provider>

                </mod-cluster-config>

            </subsystem>

Jboss Web Configurations

            <subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:web:1.4" default-virtual-server="default-host" instance-id="${jboss.node.name}" native="false">

                <connector name="http" protocol="HTTP/1.1" scheme="http" socket-binding="http"/>

                <connector name="ajp" protocol="AJP/1.3" scheme="http" socket-binding="ajp"/>

                <virtual-server name="default-host" enable-welcome-root="false">

                    <alias name="domainname"/>

                </virtual-server>

            </subsystem>

Based on the above configurations Applications are working. But we dont know whether we done a best clustering configurations. Enabled clustering with two host controller and One domain controller as well as enabled a ServerGroup which contains two nodes each in a host. Please advise if i have any anything mistake. Please let me know, this is good for production or not.

Regards ,
ArunRaj. R

[mbabacek]

Dear Arun,

as far as mod_cluster configuration is concerned, it looks sane. Perhaps you might check these wild Maxhost/Maxnode numbers, if you want to safe some allocated memory (unless you actually need that many records, obviously).

Regarding the other two topics:

• Clustering: This is a wrong forum, mod_cluster has actually nothing whatsoever in common with the clustering subsystem in EAP. We are concerned with the load balancer here. I'll kindly redirect you to the clustering/jgroups/etc. forums here.
• Domain controller/Host controllers/Hosts: As above, this is not the place to ask. In a nutshell, mod_cluster is oblivious to any domain setup you've got. Any actual host instance with ha or full-ha profile registers as a worker node with the Apache HTTP Server balancer.  Please, don't confuse this with load-balancing-group property of mod_cluster subsystem.

Big warning in red letters

------------------------------------

Mod_cluster you are using is quite old. There are several very important issues fixed in recent versions. For instance, if you have more contexts available on more nodes, you will hit a performance problem with [MODCLUSTER-372] Number of registered contexts negatively affects mod_cluster performance - JBoss Issue Tracker

The best you can do at the moment  is to migrate your setup to mod_cluster 1.2.9.Final (since you are based off of AS7).

Or go with WildFly and mod_cluster 1.3x

K.

[arun2arunraj]

Dear Michal,

Thanks for the quick reply.

If you want to safe some allocated memory

We got error like "MEM: Can't update or insert host alias",  That is why we specified the Host and Node values. We dont know whether it is good practise.

Sure I will post Clustering questions in JGroups.

Any actual host instance with ha or full-ha profile registers as a worker node with the Apache HTTP Server balancer.  Please, don't confuse this with load-balancing-group property of mod_cluster subsystem

Still I couldn't understand, Can you please explain it little bit deeper ?

Thanks & Regards,
ArunRaj. R