Apache ActiveMQ Artemis ships with 2 architectures for providing HA features. The primary and backup brokers can be configured either using network replication or using shared storage. This document will share restart sequences for the brokers under various circumstances when the client applications are connected to it.

1. Restarting 1 broker at a time

When restarting the brokers one at a time at regular intervals, it is not important to follow any sequence. We just need to make sure that at least 1 broker in the primary/backup pair is active to take up the connections from the client applications.

2. Completely shutting down the brokers and starting

If there is situation that we need to completely shutdown the brokers and start them again, please follow the following procedure:

1. Shut down all the backup brokers.

2. Shut down all the primary brokers.

3. Start all the primary brokers.

4. Start all the backup brokers.

This sequence is particularly important in case of network replication for the following reasons. If the primary broker is shutdown first the backup broker will activate and accept all the client connections. Then when the backup broker is stopped the clients will attempt to reconnect to the broker that was active most recently i.e. backup. Now, when we start the backup and primary brokers the clients will keep trying to connect to the last connection i.e. with backup and will never be able to connect until we restart the client applications. To avoid the hassle of restarting of client applications, we must follow the sequence as suggested above.

3. Split-brain situation

The following procedure helps the cluster to recover from the split-brain situation and getting the client connections auto-reconnected to the cluster. With this sequence, client applications do not need to be restarted in order to make connection with the brokers.

During the split brain situation both the primary and backup brokers are active and there is no replication that is happening from the primary broker to the backup.

In such situation, there can be some client applications that are connected to the primary broker and other connected to the backup broker. Now after we restart the brokers and the cluster is properly formed.

Here, the clients that were connected to the primary broker during the split brain situation are auto-connected to the cluster and start processing the messages. But the clients that got connected to the backup broker are still trying to make connection with the broker. This happens because the backup broker has restarted in ‘back up’ mode.

Thus, not all the clients get connected to the brokers and function properly.

To avoid such mishap, kindly follow the below sequence:

1. Stop the backup broker

2. Start the backup broker. Observe the logs for the message “Waiting for the primary”

3. Stop the primary broker.

4. Start the primary broker. Observe the primary broker logs for “Server is active” Observe the backup broker logs for “backup announced”

5. Stop the primary broker again. Wait until the backup broker becomes live. Observe that all the clients are connected to the backup broker.

6. Start the primary broker. This time, all the connections will be switched to primary broker again,