Tibco EMS fault tolerance when using an external load balancer like F5

[Abhilash Gadila]

Hello Folks,

Please help me out on this. I want to understand how does the fault tolerance works in EMS when it is front-ended by an external network load balancer like F5. Detailed setup explained below

we have two ems servers, server1 is primary[active] and server 2 is secondary[standby]

we have two load balancers F5-LB1 and F5-LB2, which run on tcp health check on port 7222, which mean, form the network load balancer perspective both and active and standby instances are up since the port 7222 is up on both.

Server1:7222 - active

Server2:7222 - standby

Active LB: http://F5-LB1 -> tcp://server1:7222

Standby LB : http://F5-LB2 -> tcp://server2:7222

Client connection factory URL [defined at ems] : tcp://server1:7222,tcp://server2:7222,tcp://F5-LB1,tcp://F5-LB2

JNDI lookup URL: tibjmsnaming://F5-LB1,tibjmsnaming://F5-LB2 [defined at the client side]

In the case when EMS fails over from server1 to server2, I would like to understand what happens with the client using JNDI lookup URL, will they get routed to the F5-LB2 automatically or they will still be routed to the F5-LB1 because it is passing the TCP health check for port 7222 on server1 [evehthough it is the standby instance now].

I understand that the Connection factory URL will work as it is pointing to the direct server URL and should natively failover to 02.

Is using a network load balacer a recommeneded practice for EMS setups

NOTE: I have setup load balancers for active and standby separately just in case we would like to add more servers in the future to make it more scalable.

[Richard Flather]

Have you looked into using the isReady/isAlive port that was introduced in 8.5 The default is port 7220 and is http. These will tell if EMS running and which one is active or standby. Your F5 should be able to use this. See the EMS 8.5/8.6 documentation for details.

[Abhilash Gadila]

You are spot on @rflather! The health check should solve this, I got the same answer form tibco support as well. Didnt know about this until today. Thanks for answering!