16.2. Active-Passive Messaging Clusters

The High Availability (HA) module provides active-passive, hot-standby messaging clusters to provide fault tolerant message delivery.

In an active-passive cluster only one broker, known as the primary, is active and serving clients at a time. The other brokers are standing by as backups. Changes on the primary are replicated to all the backups so they are always up-to-date or "hot". Backup brokers reject client connection attempts, to enforce the requirement that clients only connect to the primary.

If the primary fails, one of the backups is promoted to take over as the new primary. Clients fail-over to the new primary automatically. If there are multiple backups, the other backups also fail-over to become backups of the new primary.

This approach relies on an external cluster resource manager, rgmanager, to detect failures, choose the new primary and handle network partitions.