Configuration

Usually, a load balancer is added to the clustered deployment, in front of the servers, to help to distribute the workload. However, this is not mandatory.

If you choose to use a load balancer, it must support session affinity; this means that after a session has been established, the load balancer continues to route all requests from a particular client to a particular server. To be able to analyze streaming data in web clients, the load balancer must support WebSockets from the web client to the Spotfire Servers.

The following diagram shows a typical clustered deployment with a load balancer.

A cluster may also contain multiple Spotfire Servers that can be accessed individually through their URLs, but share the same set of node managers.

Apache Ignite

Clustering is implemented using Apache Ignite. Apache Ignite clustering requires no manual configuration. It provides TLS version 1.2 for communication and a fast clustering solution. In addition, it looks for specific nodes by using their IP address, rather than discovering any node that communicates using multicasting.

By default, Apache Ignite uses these three ports:

For information about properties in Spotfire Server that you can use for fine-tuning or troubleshooting Apache Ignite, see Apache Ignite troubleshooting and tuning.

Multiple network interfaces

If there are multiple network interfaces, and at least one of these network interfaces is not reachable from all the nodes and servers in the cluster, you must configure each server and node manager to use a specific address/network interface.

For the Spotfire servers, you must specify which address/network interface the server must use by setting the addresses property during server configuration. See Creating the bootstrap.xml file. You can also use the set-addresses command to set the correct address/network interface for the servers. See set-addresses.

For the node managers, you must specify which address/network interface to use when you install each node manager. For a Windows node manager, this is set on the Network Names page of an interactive installation, or the NODEMANAGER_HOST_NAMES in a silent installation. For a Linux node manager, set the NODEMANAGER_HOST_NAMES in the post-installation script.

Session clustering (for failover)

Session clustering enables users to continue their work without interruption even if a server goes down or must be restarted.

The sessions are stored in a shared in-memory store, so there must be at least one additional server online (within the same site) for the session to be kept. Note that there is no persistent storage available, so if all servers in a site are restarted at the same time, then the sessions will be lost.

The end-user will normally not notice that a session is handed over to another server, with the following exceptions:

config export-config --force
config set-config-prop -n clustering.session-clustering.enabled -v false
config import-config -c "Disabled session clustering"

Upgrading

Upgrading to a new version of Spotfire Server automatically switches any existing clusters to Apache Ignite clustering, if the old server environment was based on an earlier solution.