[ANNOUNCEMENT] Liferay Portal 7 CE GA4 with JGroups cluster support + fixes

[Juan Gonzalez, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi community!

As you know, Liferay kindly brought back Cluster modules for its Liferay CE version. This cluster version would be in the next GA release.

But, if you don't to wait until then, I have good news for you. I've been merging all needed commits into a Liferay 7 GA4 branch and now clustering is working again.

I've made some additional changes so it's using JGroups instead of RMI. If you still prefer to use RMI, please let me know and will give your the needed source changes to make it happen.

In this branch you will find some other additional fixes I find useful for myself. Hopefully you won't encounter any issue from those changes. If you do, please notice me.


Before writing the github branch, just wanted to clarify a few things:

• These changes aren't supported. So you are responsible of any harm caused by it. As any other open source project, just let me know if you find any error and will try to fix it if possible.
• This code isn't guaranteed for production environments. If you want this kind of support, you have Liferay Support services.
• This branch will have more commits on it. Again, it isn't guaranteed any commit will break things at some time. If you want all changes to be guaranteed, you can purchase Liferay Support services and install fixpacks.

In order to configure JGroups Multl VM Cache, you can change it by these new properties:

ehcache.jgroups.peer.provider.factory.class=net.sf.ehcache.distribution.jgroups.JGroupsCacheManagerPeerProviderFactory
    ehcache.jgroups.peer.provider.factory.properties=UDP(mcast_addr=${multicast.group.address["multi-vm"]};mcast_port=${multicast.group.port["multi-vm"]};):PING:MERGE2:FD_SOCK:VERIFY_SUSPECT:pbcast.NAKACK:UNICAST:pbcast.STABLE:FRAG:pbcast.GMS

So, the mentioned branch is here, hope it's useful:

juangon liferay-portal 7.0.3-ga4-juangon branch

Enjoy!

[Bryan Cheung, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Thanks, Juan! We are also prepping our official announcement and instructions.

[Juan Gonzalez, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Bryan Cheung:

Thanks, Juan! We are also prepping our official announcement and instructions.

Oh good to know! Thanks!

[Arun Das, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi Juan,
First of all, thanks a ton. Finally Liferay 7 getting cluster support. So happy to hear that.

Arun

[Krzysztof Gołębiowski, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

That's great! This was a huge problem for many "low-cost/developing" companies and now they can go back to Liferay again!

[Grzegorz Kucner, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

That's true, without clustering option we couldn't even recommend Liferay 7 CE in such projects. Clients had to use Liferay 6.2 or move to another solution which meant that they abandon Liferay for next years!

[Piotr Paradiuk, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Awesome news - Liferay CE is back in the game.

[Juan Gonzalez, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Piotr Paradiuk:

Awesome news - Liferay CE is back in the game.

Arun Das:

Hi Juan,
First of all, thanks a ton. Finally Liferay 7 getting cluster support. So happy to hear that. emoticonemoticon

Krzysztof Gołębiowski:

That's great! This was a huge problem for many "low-cost/developing" companies and now they can go back to Liferay again!

Grzegorz Kucner:

That's true, without clustering option we couldn't even recommend Liferay 7 CE in such projects. Clients had to use Liferay 6.2 or move to another solution which meant that they abandon Liferay for next years!

I am very happy for such a possitive feedback! I agree that having cluster back in CE it will be great for everyone.

BTW, I've found that some portal-cache-ehcache-multiple module configuration was still pointing to RMI classes. I've just pushed the fix to my branch. Please, pull the latest changes and, if you already did built Liferay, just shutdown Liferay, compile and deploy just portal-cache-ehcache-multiple module. In these cases removing osgi/state folder is advisable.

Thanks!

[Alexey Kakunin, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Hi Juan!
I finally found a time to test clustering for Liferay 7.0.4 GA5 - so, I've simple sintalled two liferay on same machine (just using different ports), connected them to same DB and same external ES, added cluster.link.enabled=true (according to this documentation - https://dev.liferay.com/discover/deployment/-/knowledge_base/7-0/liferay-clustering) and.... nothing happens. I do no see anything in logs - as well as simple check show me that cache is not replicated between nodes.

Are anything else required to be done in 7.0.4 CE to enable cache synchronization? Documentation said nothing about it (just enable cluster.link and everything start working). From another side - you mentioned here module portal-cache-ehcache-multiple - but looking into CE osgi - it looks like not included - should I compile and deploy by myself?

[Alexey Kakunin, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

OK, I've looked into resources more carefuly. Even it is missed in official documentation - but according to this news (https://community.liferay.com/news/new-clustering-code-for-liferay-portal-community/) it looks like clustering support is not provided in CE out-of-box, but should be compiled from sources. And actually according your newer blog-post (https://web.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/97704861) this support is based on RMI, in case your branch is about supporting cache synhronization via JGroups.

Hope I've understand everything correctly - will continue my experiments.

[David H Nebinger, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Yeah, Alexey, it is not available OOTB in the bundle download, you are "supposed" to build and deploy yourself.

Juan's branch had the cluster stuff added to the portal source and ready for building; I don't know if his branch is actually still needed (He had it woven into GA4 but Liferay was only targeting GA5).

But you do have to weave in the cluster source and do the build and configuration on your own.

[Juan Gonzalez, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

David H Nebinger:

Yeah, Alexey, it is not available OOTB in the bundle download, you are "supposed" to build and deploy yourself.

Juan's branch had the cluster stuff added to the portal source and ready for building; I don't know if his branch is actually still needed (He had it woven into GA4 but Liferay was only targeting GA5).

But you do have to weave in the cluster source and do the build and configuration on your own.

This reminds me I was planning to make a slight change in order to not depend on portal-kernel change. and then attach needed module jar files, so this feature can be installed much easier. Hopefully I can do pretty soon!

[Juan Gonzalez, modificado 6 Anos atrás.]

Alexey Kakunin:

OK, I've looked into resources more carefuly. Even it is missed in official documentation - but according to this news (https://community.liferay.com/news/new-clustering-code-for-liferay-portal-community/) it looks like clustering support is not provided in CE out-of-box, but should be compiled from sources. And actually according your newer blog-post (https://web.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/97704861) this support is based on RMI, in case your branch is about supporting cache synhronization via JGroups.

Hope I've understand everything correctly - will continue my experiments.

For GA5, just follow steps here: https://web.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/view_message/97764875

One step you didn't say was removing some modules or adding those to blacklist. After this step you should startup Liferay.

Waiting for your checks...