Activemq cluster of embedded brokers and failover consumers - spring

Question

Environment
There is an existing software with propietary way of clustering, which should be moved to use JMS
The customer do not want to pay for setting up and mainaining a
messaging system, so it can be used ONLY if I can embedd the whole
messaging into the existing virtual machines
Broker instances and consumers should be in the same JVM. Consumers
should be able to connect to remote broker in failover situations, since all consumers no matter in which JVM will they run, should have ONE input queue.
it would be nice if the consumers would use direct method calls to
communicate with local broker
Demo Project
I have created a really simple demo (eclipse) project with ActiveMQ + Maven + Spring (the whole project is at http://www.woofiles.com/dl-279452-fOcsWkcm-activemq.zip). If you try it, change the dataDirectory of activemq, since it is a wired absolute path till now.
I try to start up a broker from spring, and also a set of consumers. See Spring config below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:amq="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" xmlns:task="http://www.springframework.org/schema/task"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core
http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core/activemq-core.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/task
http://www.springframework.org/schema/task/spring-task-3.0.xsd">
<bean id="propertyConfigurer"
class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
<property name="systemPropertiesModeName" value="SYSTEM_PROPERTIES_MODE_FALLBACK" />
</bean>
<bean id="embeddedBroker" class="org.apache.activemq.broker.BrokerService"
destroy-method="stop" init-method="start" >
<property name="brokerName" value="conversion" />
<property name="dataDirectory"
value="c:\eclipseWithMaven\activemq\working\conversion" />
<property name="schedulerSupport" value="false" />
<property name="transportConnectorURIs">
<list>
<value>tcp://127.0.0.1:600${idOfClusterNode}</value>
</list>
</property>
<property name="managementContext">
<bean class="org.apache.activemq.broker.jmx.ManagementContext">
<property name="connectorPort" value="201${idOfClusterNode}" />
</bean>
</property>
</bean>
<!-- depends-on see why at http://activemq.apache.org/vm-transport-reference.html -->
<!--depends-on="embeddedBroker" -->
<bean id="jmsFactory" class="org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory" depends-on="embeddedBroker">
<property name="brokerURL">
<value>failover:(vm:/conversion,tcp://127.0.0.1:6001,tcp://127.0.0.1:6002)</value>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="cachedConnectionFactory"
class="org.springframework.jms.connection.CachingConnectionFactory"
p:targetConnectionFactory-ref="jmsFactory" p:sessionCacheSize="10" />
<bean id="container"
class="org.springframework.jms.listener.SimpleMessageListenerContainer">
<property name="concurrentConsumers" value="10" />
<property name="connectionFactory" ref="cachedConnectionFactory" />
<property name="messageListener" ref="conversion" />
<property name="destination" ref="conversionInputQueue" />
</bean>
<bean id="conversionInputQueue" class="org.apache.activemq.command.ActiveMQQueue">
<constructor-arg value="conversionInputQueue" />
</bean>
<bean id="conversion" class="activemq.Conversion"
p:clusterId="${idOfClusterNode}" />
</beans>
I simply try to start up one or two instances of the activemq.ConversionDemo class with different parameters used by spring & log4j config. The environment entries of the run config looks like this:
Instance 1 : -DidOfClusterNode=1 -DidOfOtherClusterNode=2 -DlogFile=conversion1.log
Instance 2: -DidOfClusterNode=2 -DidOfOtherClusterNode=1
-DlogFile=conversion2.log
If I start up one instance, it is fine. If two is running the following problems occoured:
The second broker will not start up at all. It says it does not have the lock. Its fine, but I supposed, it just starts up a thread asynchronously, and will give back the control to spring. But it seems, that it wont let spring to continue.
SimpleMessageListenerContainer also seems like holding the control
over spring till all consumers are started.
What I want
I want to meet the requirements above
I think I have to start up both brokers and consumers asynchronously,
which I cannot really do in spring with this config
It would be nice to have real load balancing between brokers. It seems, that ActiveMQ is prepared only for failover.
If my needs cannot be satisfied by ActiveMQ, please recommend
other free solution.
If you need further info, just let me know.
EDIT
I think ActiveMQ supports my needs, I just need to understand "network of brokers". So I guess I have to have two filestore, and a network from my two brokers.

Answer 1

if you point 2 brokers at the same file store, then the first one will get the lock and the 2nd will block until the lock is released...this is a shared file system master/slave setup
if you want an active/active setup, then you'll need to use separate file stores and wire them together as a network of brokers