Tomcat cluster installation in a cloud

Question

In a Cloud where multiple VMs are running and with IP addresses being dynamic (dhcp), what is the approach to set up a tomcat cluster. Kindly share your experiences and ideas.

One way I can think of is that since dhcp address range is known, the worker.properties file could be created (generated) with all IP addresses in the given range. Whichever nodes are up, they take part in the cluster.

The obvious downside to this approach is if in a particular VM there is someother server listening in port 8080, which could be mistaken for a tomcat worker node.

Kindly share your experiences and ideas.

Answer 1

Differenty clouds have different schemes for networking.
Using Amazon Ec2 as an example. It has the private IP addresses which are dynamic. Public Ip addresses which are static.

Obviously using public ips are easier If you use so 8 servers in Tomcat then you define your 8 ip addresses to Tomcat and of you go.

Private ip address This is unlimited. You need to write some sort of script on Tomcat to interogate amazon ec2 and perhaps update the hosts for say tomcat1 to tomcatn. In tomcat you define tomact1 to tomcatn in the config.

overtime software should get smarter and handle dynamic ip addresses.

Neill Turner

http://www.elastdream.com