Apache load balancer with fail-over and Glassfish v2ur2+
Introduction

In general when people think about running a load balancer in front of a Java based application server it usually is Tomcat. This article describes how you can use Glassfish instead. It will also enable you to have automatic fail-over.

Requirements Setup

Add the following to make Apache load balance to your Glassfish cluster: 

  RewriteEngine On
  ProxyRequests Off

  <Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
  </Proxy>

  <Location /balancer-manager>
    SetHandler balancer-manager
  </Location>

  <Proxy balancer://mycluster>
    BalancerMember http://10.1.1.2:38080 route=w1
    BalancerMember http://10.1.1.3:38080 route=w2
    BalancerMember http://10.1.1.4:38080 route=w3
  </Proxy>

  <Location /clusterjsp>
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Location>

  ProxyPass /clusterjsp balancer://mycluster/clusterjsp lbmethod=byrequests

And for Glassfish you need to set up a cluster. See the cluster article for more information on how to setup a cluster. Once you have done that please return to this article for the remaining steps.

You now have both Apache and the cluster configured so it is time to check if the load-balancer is online. Browse to http://localhost/balancer-manager (where localhost is your Apache server) and verify if the load-balancer sees the 3 workers and if the routes are set. Now the last remaining step is to deploy a clusterable application.

The Glassfish distribution contains an example application that you can deploy on a cluster. See $GLASSFISH_ROOT/samples/quickstart/clusterjsp. Go to the administration console of the administration server and select your cluster. Click on the Applications tab and click on Deploy, select the clusterjsp.ear file that you found in the Glassfish samples and make sure Availability is checked (this is for the fail-over). Then click OK. Then browse to http://localhost/clusterjsp and see your work in action!

You now are using Apache load-balancing, mod_proxy with a Glassfish cluster together. Please send comments, suggestions and any feedback to sales@manorrock.com.

(Glassfish 2)


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