ActiveMQ Artemis configure standalone brokers with failover and statically assigned queues - activemq-artemis

Question

I am trying to figure out how to utilize ActiveMQ Artemis to achieve the following topology. I do need to have several producers writing to queues hosted on two standalone Artemis brokers. For the moment every producer creates two connection factories which handle the connections to the 2 brokers and create the corresponding queues.
#Bean
public ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactoryBroker1() {
ActiveMQConnectionFactory connectionFactory = new ActiveMQConnectionFactory(brokerUrl_1,username,password);
return connectionFactory;
}
#Bean
public ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactoryBroker2() {
ActiveMQConnectionFactory connectionFactory = new ActiveMQConnectionFactory(brokerUrl_2,username,password);
return connectionFactory;
}
My main issue is that I need to know which queue is assigned to which broker and at the same time I need to know that if one broker is down for some reason that I can re-create that queue to the other broker on the fly and avoid losing any further messages. So my approach was to setup broker urls as below
artemis.brokerUrl_1=(tcp://myhost1:61616,tcp://myhost2:61616)?randomize=false
artemis.brokerUrl_2=(tcp://myhost2:61616,tcp://myhost1:61616)?randomize=false
So using a different JmsTemplate for each broker url my intention was that when referring to JmsTemplate
using brokerUrl_1 would create the queues on myhost1, and the same for the corresponding JmsTemplate
for brokerUrl_2.
I would have expected (due to randomize parameter) that each queue would have some kind of static membership to a broker and in the case of a broker's failure there would be some kind of migration by re-creating the queue from scratch to the other broker.
Instead what I notice that almost every time the distribution of queue creation does not happen as perceived but rather randomly since the same queue can appear in either broker which is not a desirable
for my use-case.
How can I approach this case and solve my problem in a way that I can create my queues on a predefined broker and have the fail-safe that if one broker is down the producer will create the same queue to the
other broker and continue?
Note that having shared state between the brokers is not an option

Answer 1

The randomize=false doesn't apply to the Artemis core JMS client. It only applies to the OpenWire JMS client distributed with ActiveMQ 5.x. Which connector is selected from the URL is determined by the connection load-balancing policy as discussed in the documentation. The default connection load-balancing policy is org.apache.activemq.artemis.api.core.client.loadbalance.RoundRobinConnectionLoadBalancingPolicy which will select a random connector from the URL list and then round-robin connections after that. There are other policies available, and if none of them give you the behavior you want then you can potentially implement your own.
That said, it sounds like what you really want/need is 2 pairs of brokers where each pair consists of a live and a backup. That way if the live broker fails then all the clients can fail-over to the backup and you won't have to deal with any of this other complexity of this "fake" fail-over functionality you're trying to implement.
Also, since you're using Spring's JmsTemplate you should be aware of some well-known anti-patterns that it uses which may significantly impact performance in a negative way.