High Availability (HA), a.k.a Clustering

EJBCA is designed to work well in a clustered, high availability configuration. The key to EJBCA high availability is to have a HA database, since all EJBCA nodes shares the same database. The process of setting up EJBCA in a HA setup is:

  1. Install a HA database. The process for this differs between databases, consult your database documentation/vendor.

  2. Install EJBCA on one EJBCA application node and perform all needed configuration.

  3. Deploy EJBCA with the exact same configuration on other application nodes.

  4. If you are using HSMs, connect one HSM with the same (duplicated) keys on all EJBCA application nodes. Alternatively set up a HA HSM configuration according to your vendors instructions.

When set up you can connect to any of the EJBCA application nodes, and use load balancers to failover and/or spread the load between the different EJBCA application nodes.

A note of caution. Setting up and managing a fully HA database can be very difficult and/or expensive. You may consider different variants of HA databases, such as replication with manual or automatic failover. The possibilities are virtually unlimited, only your requirements and imagination can decide what type of configuration works best for you.

To upgrade EJBCA without downtime, you can make use of a few properties to enforce backwards compatibility during node upgrades. See doc/UPGRADE for the versions you upgrade between for details.