How do I cluster ServiceMix?

Question

I am looking for some initial pointers on how to cluster a ServiceMix solution. Basically what I need is:

having 2 (or more) ServiceMix instances serving my routing needs and sharing the load
if one instance fails, other(s) continue to serve
if the failed one is brought back to life, it joins the party

Searching for information confuses me since

some references (eg. http://trenaman.blogspot.fi/2010/04/four-things-you-need-to-know-about-new.html) talk about "JBI cluster engine". I don't want to use JBI. Support for it is deprecated. Is there a separate "Non-JBI cluster engine" or what is going on...?
I see a lot of mentions about "DOSGi". Do I need to worry my simple head with all that if I want to achieve clustered ServiceMix?

My solution will probably have a few bundles that communicate with each other using JMS queues. Should I in that case just have 2 independent ServiceMix instances (who do not know of each other). Wouldn't that be the simplest option? I see some support for a failover configuration (http://servicemix.apache.org/docs/4.5.x/users-guide/failover.html) but what benefits would that really give (am I missing something)? Also this failover configuration does not help with load balancing since just one instance is serving requests.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 05 '13 at 10:32

5

From what it sounds like, all you need is two ServiceMix instances running side by side with no failover specifically configured. Failover is there if you want a cluster of instances, only one of which services requests.

Ignore the JBI stuff - it's legacy. Distributed OSGi is a red herring in the use case that you have described.

As boday suggests, Cellar is used to manage the installation of your bundles uniformly across a logical group of Karaf/ServiceMix instances, so you can manage them from one location as opposed to installing new versions on each instance by hand.

answered Jun 05 '13 at 10:32

Jakub Korab

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Thank you. Do I understand correctly - using Cellar does not mean I have to get into DOSGi or care about it much? It would just help me in the deployment? And if I don't mind a little extra work, I can forget abut Cellar as well and just deploy updated versions on each instance by hand? – Janne Mattila Jun 07 '13 at 09:45
That's right. Please remember to vote up if this has been useful. – Jakub Korab Jun 07 '13 at 14:44

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 03 '14 at 08:04

Fabric8 (http://fabric8.io/) can do Karaf/ServiceMix clustering and much more out of the box. It also have additional clustered Camel components such as the master and fabric endpoints

There is a clustered Camel example, that demonstrates that

https://github.com/fabric8io/fabric8/tree/master/fabric/fabric8-karaf/src/main/resources/distro/fabric/import/fabric/profiles/example/camel/cluster

The principle is illustrated in the image below:

enter image description here

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 03 '13 at 18:29

0

take a look at Apache Cellar as its targeted at these use cases...

http://karaf.apache.org/index/subprojects/cellar.html

answered Jun 03 '13 at 18:29

Ben ODay

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How do I cluster ServiceMix?

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