We’ve been testing/piloting Openfire and Spark in our corporate environment for possible company wide implementation. So far so good, but our current setup is a simple one using the embedded database and authentication against our AD environment. For a production implementation we really would like to have some redundancy on the server side. I’ve searched through the threads here and found good information, but I’m still a bit confused about what our options are.
From what I read here it seems clustering is not a viable option unless there is some change in licensing (someone please correct me if I am wrong on that). I would be happy to have an active/passive server situation behind hardware load balancers that we already use on our network, but the two posts I note below make it unclear whether or not we could accomplish that.
I was hopeful when I read this text in this thread:
*"To have fail over I would recommend having 2 Openfire servers where one is active and the other *
*one is just sitting there. You may put a load balancer in front or something that will detect when *
*a server goes down and then redirect the traffic to the other server.
Note that in XMPP the connections are long lived. That means that if an XMPP server goes down then *
*clients will need to reconnect. This means that when a server goes down clients will notice it. *
*Smart clients may reconnect and hide that fact to users but still there is a reconnection since *
the TCP connection went down."
We would accept a situation where if the primary server failed all connections would drop and users would have to re-connect and authenticate (presumably to the secondary server that the load balancers would now direct the clients to). My assumption was that we could use a remote database for each server (MSSQL in our case as we have a HA MSSQL “farm” used for many other applications) and replicate data between the databases.
But then I read this:
*"Every Openfire server still needs it’s local database which stores the server name *
(east.example.com and west.example.com) and all other things like MUC information."
Assuming a failover situation described above with sync’d remote databases, I am unclear whether or not the information available to users on the primary server will be available to users once they connect to the secondary server. It appears that some information will be in the remote SQL database but some information will still be contained locally on the server (??)
Can someone help me get a clear understanding of this? I would love to hear from a corporate type who has done something like this especially with layer seven type load balance/failover devices.