Hazelcast clustering with WSO2 carbon servers in 20 minutes - part 2

Since first part of this blog post explains about clustering concepts, I would rather directly start this blog post with configuring the servers. The primary focus of this blog post is to show the interaction of well-known-members and rest of the other members. This knowledge is a must to have if you are working with any clustered deployment. Any behavior of this cluster is more or less influenced by the implementation of Hazelcast. Therefore, knowing Hazelcast would always provide you an extra support.

Deployment diagram 

Let's start with the deployment diagram. For this deployment I will be using four ESB instances and two of which would be well-known-members where as the other two are dynamic members. Yes, this is not a real world production deployment but an ideal deployment to understand any production deployment. 

Wondering why two WKAs ?

All right, now you must be wondering why there are two well-known-members and two ordinary members. For a given cluster, it is best  that if we can make all the members as well-known-members. You'll get to know why later. However, this is not practical in reality and as a result we will have to have both dynamic and static members (well-known-member). 

Therefore, we have to elect few members as well-known-members and for this cluster I have elected two well-known-members. This is mainly to avoid single point of failure. Without well-known-members there is no way a new node to join a cluster. So in this case, if one well-known-member goes down still we can keep our cluster pretty much alive as we have another. 

As a rule of thumb, it is always better to have as many WKAs as possible. So, you have the luxury to point dynamic members to well-known-members as many as possible. The higher the well-known-members, the higher the availability.

Configuring the servers

Configuring the well-known-members

Let's start configuring the well-known-members. The only file you have to touch in order to do this is the axis2.xml. Yes, that is the only file. Following is the configuration snippet of the well-known-member 1. 

   
   true
   
   
   wka
   
   wso2.esb.domain
   
   45564
   100
   60

   
   127.0.0.1

   
   4100

   
      
      
   

   
   
      
         127.0.0.1
         4200
      
   

   
      
   
   

I have removed all the default comments and added some new comments to guide you guys through the configurations. Now, we can start well-known-member 1. Since, I have used the same machine for the complete deployment, to start well-known-member 2 all I have to do is changing the localMemberPort port to some unique value. I have changed it to 4200 as follows.

4200

Needless to say when you start multiple carbon servers in the same machine you have to set the port offset. For this deployment, I opted to start the sever with sh  ./bin/wso2server.sh -DportOffset=1. However, there is something you need to know. Changing the port offset does NOT impact localMemberPort. 

Upon successful start you should be able to see something similar to the following in the console.

[2014-08-10 21:55:33,921]  INFO - WKABasedMembershipScheme Member joined [3e823e7e-e897-4625-abb9-7b6c3cca8d1f]: /127.0.0.1:4100
[2014-08-10 21:55:35,963]  INFO - MemberUtils Added member: Host:127.0.0.1, Remote Host:null, Port: 4100, HTTP:8280, HTTPS:8243, Domain: wso2.esb.domain, Sub-domain:__$default, Active:true

Configuring the Dynamic-members

We just have to follow the same step changing the localMemberPort to configure the dynamic members. But there is one additional step to do. In the members list we have to mention about the WKAs. Doing this automatically makes the other two members as WKAs. There is no other special configuration to make a member a WKA member. Following code snippet shows how to do this. 

   
      127.0.0.1
      4100
   
   
      127.0.0.1
      4200
   

All right that is about it. You have your own Hazelcast cluster with WSO2 carbon servers. Now you can enhance the cluster by adding the following,

• A external GREG to share common resources between all the members in the cluster.
• A deployment synchronizer to synchronize artifacts among other members.
• A load balancer to rout the load to each member of this cluster. 

To learn more on WSO2 product clustering see [1].

[1] https://docs.wso2.com/display/CLUSTER420/WSO2+Clustering+and+Deployment+Guide