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Chapter 19. Clustered JNDI Services

JNDI is one of the most important services provided by the application server. The JBoss HA-JNDI (High Availability JNDI) service brings the following features to JNDI:
  • Transparent failover of naming operations. If an HA-JNDI naming Context is connected to the HA-JNDI service on a particular JBoss Enterprise Application Platform instance, and that service fails or is shut down, the HA-JNDI client can transparently fail over to another Enterprise Application Platform instance.
  • Load balancing of naming operations. A HA-JNDI naming Context will automatically load balance its requests across all the HA-JNDI servers in the cluster.
  • Automatic client discovery of HA-JNDI servers (using multicast).
  • Unified view of JNDI trees cluster-wide. A client can connect to the HA-JNDI service running on any node in the cluster and find objects bound in JNDI on any other node. This is accomplished via two mechanisms:
    • Cross-cluster lookups. A client can perform a lookup and the server side HA-JNDI service has the ability to find things bound in regular JNDI on any node in the cluster.
    • A replicated cluster-wide context tree. An object bound into the HA-JNDI service will be replicated around the cluster, and a copy of that object will be available in-VM on each node in the cluster.
JNDI is a key component for many other interceptor-based clustering services: those services register themselves with JNDI so the client can look up their proxies and make use of their services. HA-JNDI completes the picture by ensuring that clients have a highly-available means to look up those proxies. However, it is important to understand that using HA-JNDI (or not) has no effect whatsoever on the clustering behavior of the objects that are looked up. To illustrate:
  • If an EJB is not configured as clustered, looking up the EJB via HA-JNDI does not somehow result in the addition of clustering capabilities (load balancing of EJB calls, transparent failover, state replication) to the EJB.
  • If an EJB is configured as clustered, looking up the EJB via regular JNDI instead of HA-JNDI does not somehow result in the removal of the bean proxy's clustering capabilities.

19.1. How it works

The JBoss client-side HA-JNDI naming Context is based on the client-side interceptor architecture (see the Introduction and Quick Start chapter). The client obtains an HA-JNDI proxy object (via the InitialContext object) and invokes JNDI lookup services on the remote server through the proxy. The client specifies that it wants an HA-JNDI proxy by configuring the naming properties used by the InitialContext object. This is covered in detail in Section 19.2, “Client configuration”. Other than the need to ensure the appropriate naming properties are provided to the InitialContext, the fact that the naming Context is using HA-JNDI is completely transparent to the client.
On the server side, the HA-JNDI service maintains a cluster-wide context tree. The cluster wide tree is always available as long as there is one node left in the cluster. Each node in the cluster also maintains its own local JNDI context tree. The HA-JNDI service on each node is able to find objects bound into the local JNDI context tree, and is also able to make a cluster-wide RPC to find objects bound in the local tree on any other node. An application can bind its objects to either tree, although in practice most objects are bound into the local JNDI context tree. The design rationale for this architecture is as follows:
  • It avoids migration issues with applications that assume that their JNDI implementation is local. This allows clustering to work out-of-the-box with just a few tweaks of configuration files.
  • In a homogeneous cluster, this configuration actually cuts down on the amount of network traffic. A homogenous cluster is one where the same types of objects are bound under the same names on each node.
  • Designing it in this way makes the HA-JNDI service an optional service since all underlying cluster code uses a straight new InitialContext to lookup or create bindings.
On the server side, a naming Context obtained via a call to new InitialContext() will be bound to the local-only, non-cluster-wide JNDI Context. So, all EJB homes and such will not be bound to the cluster-wide JNDI Context, but rather, each home will be bound into the local JNDI.
When a remote client does a lookup through HA-JNDI, HA-JNDI will delegate to the local JNDI service when it cannot find the object within the global cluster-wide Context. The detailed lookup rule is as follows.
  • If the binding is available in the cluster-wide JNDI tree, return it.
  • If the binding is not in the cluster-wide tree, delegate the lookup query to the local JNDI service and return the received answer if available.
  • If not available, the HA-JNDI service asks all other nodes in the cluster if their local JNDI service owns such a binding and returns the answer from the set it receives.
  • If no local JNDI service owns such a binding, a NameNotFoundException is finally raised.
In practice, objects are rarely bound in the cluster-wide JNDI tree; rather they are bound in the local JNDI tree. For example, when EJBs are deployed, their proxies are always bound in local JNDI, not HA-JNDI. So, an EJB home lookup done through HA-JNDI will always be delegated to the local JNDI instance.

Note

If different beans (even of the same type, but participating in different clusters) use the same JNDI name, this means that each JNDI server will have a logically different "target" bound under the same name (JNDI on node 1 will have a binding for bean A and JNDI on node 2 will have a binding, under the same name, for bean B). Consequently, if a client performs a HA-JNDI query for this name, the query will be invoked on any JNDI server of the cluster and will return the locally bound stub. Nevertheless, it may not be the correct stub that the client is expecting to receive! So, it is always best practice to ensure that across the cluster different names are used for logically different bindings.

Note

If a binding is only made available on a few nodes in the cluster (for example because a bean is only deployed on a small subset of nodes in the cluster), the probability is higher that a lookup will hit a HA-JNDI server that does not own this binding and thus the lookup will need to be forwarded to all nodes in the cluster. Consequently, the query time will be longer than if the binding would have been available locally. Moral of the story: as much as possible, cache the result of your JNDI queries in your client.

Note

You cannot currently use a non-JNP JNDI implementation (i.e. LDAP) for your local JNDI implementation if you want to use HA-JNDI. However, you can use JNDI federation using the ExternalContext MBean to bind non-JBoss JNDI trees into the JBoss JNDI namespace. Furthermore, nothing prevents you using one centralized JNDI server for your whole cluster and scrapping HA-JNDI and JNP.