Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Colin Hudler <>]

Our deployment aims to reduce chance of complete failure due to failure 
of a single component. You could call this HA. Shared-nothing pattern 
makes this easy. We did not believe that different style of cluster 
(jvm) would be best for us.

1) Two webservice nodes are round-robin load-balanced behind a single 
IP. This is easy because the webservice is stateless.
2) Two UI nodes are load-balanced and very sticky based on the cookie.
3) A single "automations" server handles sundry cronjobs, scripts, GSH, 
and quartz jobs. This one is not used by the users and has no buddy. It 
is rather important, but jobs can be moved easily to another node, if 
needed.
4) The database is Oracle with some Dataguard features (HA). This uses a 
standby database that will be enabled transparently if the primary 
fails. This works pretty well with grouper in my experience. There's 
about 30 seconds downtime (db connection error), but it recovered 
automatically.

This design has evolved over time to be what it is now. DB availability 
is key, obviously. We also worked to integrate it with our 
release-management and configuration management. All of the grouper 
nodes share configuration, libraries, and have identical on-disk 
structure. The only difference between the nodes is the servlets, 
services, and scripts that are running. This is determined once at 
deploy-time but can be altered at any other time.


On 10/10/11 10:56 PM, Adrian Lee wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're currently looking at piloting Grouper and the question has been raised 
> about the possibility of a high availability (HA) deployment.   The database
> and sources (LDAP in this case) are both HA.  Assuming a load-balancer is 
> front-ending Grouper, that just leaves tomcat. Tomcat has clustering recipes 
> - anyone tried/thought-about-trying such a configuration for Grouper?    Any 
> thoughts on why this might be a bad idea?   Would clustering actually be 
> necessary?
>
> Thanks,
> Adrian
> -----------------
> Adrian Lee
> Information Technology Services
> The University of Queensland