Multiple JIRA Servers with License instead of JIRA Data Center

Thompson Cherian April 19, 2018

We require JIRA Service Desk to be setup with High Availability and DR setup for an user base of 5000 customers and 3 agents.

For this requirements if we purchase, say 10 JIRA Service Desk licenses and configure them for High Availability and Disaster Recovery similar to the Data Center Configuration. Will it violate Atlassian Terms and Conditions and would we get support if an issues are faced ?

2 answers

3 votes
Joey F.
Atlassian Team
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April 19, 2018

Server license doesn't allow for high availability. High availability means multiple server nodes which are active simultaneously. As stated in our Purchasing FAQ, each license permits only the deployment of a single instance of the software in a production environment.

Thompson Cherian April 19, 2018

Thank for the response. But as I had shared above, if I am having separate License for each instance, why can't I not have HA setup?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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April 19, 2018

A separate licence for each server will be fine. 

But they won't be sharing data or clustering, they'll simply be a string of separate Jira servers with their own databases and files.

1 vote
Sloan N_ B_
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April 19, 2018

Hey Thompson

This will not work. For Datacenter's features you need a Datacenter License...
You can't cluster "normal" Jira Server instances.

What is your idea of similar configuration by the way?

Cheers
Niklas

Thompson Cherian April 19, 2018

Configuring the separate JIRA instance to use the same "Application-Directory"  via sharing the same via RSYNC or required configuration.

Configure a Load Balancer for the servers.

All the said applications will be using the same database. 

Sloan N_ B_
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April 19, 2018

Hi again

This will definitely not work. As a Load balancer and shared resources are only available in Jira Datacenter.

https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center

Thompson Cherian April 19, 2018

Why not? What will stop a load balancer from redirecting to the various JIRA Servers and the applications to share the resources via syncing the data between them or making them use the same shared storage?

This is practically possible from a configuration point of view.  Only thing is whether its violating Atlassian terms and conditions.

Sloan N_ B_
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April 19, 2018

Outside of Jira you can use a Loadbalancer for sure. But it will be a mess regarding User management, and your contents. And using a single database for multiple Jira will probably result in a corrupted database.

As of licensing I am not sure.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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April 19, 2018

In support of Niklas, he's absolutely right, your set up simply will not work.

Specifically on your individual points:

>Configuring the separate JIRA instance to use the same "Application-Directory"  via sharing the same via RSYNC or required configuration.

Cannot work, as shared storage is two slow to be useful for parts of the home directory, and each separate instance will lock files in the shared system, crashing the others

>Configure a Load Balancer for the servers.

This is fine, but how are you going to handle session states?

>All the said applications will be using the same database. 

No they won't.  The first Jira that starts will lock the others out completely

Thompson Cherian April 19, 2018

Thanks for sharing your inputs. But here's the documentation from Atlassian regarding the Data Center Configuration

______________________________________________________________________________________________

 Node requirements

Requirements specific to Data Center include requirements for nodes that create the cluster:

  • Each node is a separate machine (physical or virtual). They don't need to be identical, but should be as similar as possible for consistent performance.
  • All nodes are running the same version of JIRA. You'll be copying JIRA from one node to another, so this shouldn't be a problem. They use the same timezone, and have the current time synced. You can use ntpd to set this up.
  • All nodes share a common database, also installed on a separate machine.
  • All nodes can access the shared home directory. You can set it up using NFS, or a similar solution. We'll mention it in this guide

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

So what difference does it make to have separate JIRA licenses for each server and do the above configuration with a Shared Home Directory and Common Database?

Since JIRA is running on Tomcat, we can manage the clustering and sessions configurations as shared below,

https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/cluster-howto.html

My question is, technical complexities aside, are we violating any terms and conditions if we setup and achieve High Availability and DR setup using multiple JIRA Servers ( with individual License for each instance) 

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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April 19, 2018

There's no harm in having several Jira Server systems set up like that.  But you can NOT run more than one of them at a time.  You'll want to pay attention to the structure of the shared file system, probably using links to relocate parts of the directory that should not be shared.

You will also have given yourself a warm standby system - if your first Jira server goes wrong, it will not take long to stop it (if it's still running), and start up one of the other nodes as a replacement.  And it'll be a good start on creating a DC instance, as you'll be  pretty much able to apply DC licences and start it up.

Tomcat's clustering will appear to work fine, but you won't be able to start more than one of the nodes.

Thompson Cherian April 19, 2018

Thanks for the reply.

" But you can NOT run more than one of them at a time. "  - Why ? I didn't get the reason for why not. 

"You'll want to pay attention to the structure of the shared file system, probably using links to relocate parts of the directory that should not be shared."  - How does this problem get resolved in Data Center edition as we are using Shared File System.

"Tomcat's clustering will appear to work fine, but you won't be able to start more than one of the nodes." - Limitation of Tomcat Clustering Setup or JIRA ?

And again my question is, apart from technical complications in implementing the setup. Are we violating the terms and conditions.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 19, 2018

You would be violating your licence terms, as @Joey F. points out, unless you had a separate licence for each server.

As I said already, a Jira Server takes an exclusive lock on the system, so the second and subsequent instances will simply fail to start as they detect that there is already a Jira server working with the database.

If you install Jira as per Data Center instructions, the home directory will be in a different shape to a standard Server installation.  The installation guide for DC tells you which bits of the home directory get shared and hence have to be put into another (shared) directory.  Server won't look there for them though, it expects them to be in the home directory.  So if you are going to set this up, you will want to place symbolic links to the shared areas into the home directory, remembering to remove them if you do decide to convert to DC.

The Tomcat clustering is as above - the clustering will work fine, but Jira will ignore it, and the first server that starts will lock the others out.

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