Resilient Enterprise Messaging with JBoss A-MQ & Red Hat Enterprise Linux

By Scott McCarty November 12, 2013

Background

At JUDCon 2013 in Boston, Scott Cranton and I presented a talk entitled Resilient Enterprise Messaging with Fuse & Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This technical article is the follow up work from that presentation.

JBoss A-MQ is built on ActiveMQ which is a robust messaging platform that supports STOMP, JMS, AMQP and modern principals in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). It’s built from the ground up to be loosely coupled and asynchronous in nature. This provides ActiveMQ with native high availability capabilities. An administrator can easily configure an ActiveMQ master/slave architecture with a shared filesystem. In the future this will be augmented with Replicated LevelDB.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the popular, stable and scalable Linux distribution which has High Availability and Resilient Storage add-on support built on CMAN, RGManager, Corosync, and GFS2. High Availability and Resilient Storage expand upon the high availability capabilities built into ActiveMQ and provide a robust, and complete solution for enterprise deployments that require deeper clustering capabilities.

There are two main architectures commonly used to provide fault tolerance to a messaging server. The first is master/slave which is easy to configure, but as it scales, it requires 2X resources. The second is made up of active nodes and redundant nodes. The redundant nodes can take over for any one of the active nodes should they scale. The active/redundant architecture requires more software and more initial configuration, but uses N+1 or N+2 resources as it scales.

This article will explore the technical requirements and best practices for building and designing a N+1 architecture using JBoss A-MQ, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the High Availability Add-On and the Resilient Storage Add-On.