Adding and Removing Data Center Nodes
Your Data Center license is based on the number of users in your cluster, rather than the number of nodes. This means you can add and remove nodes from your Data Center cluster at any time.
If you deployed Confluence Data Center on AWS using the Quick Start, your Confluence and Synchrony nodes will be in auto-scaling groups. You will add and remove nodes in the AWS console either by changing the minimum and maximum size of each group or using a scaling plan.
On this page:
Adding a node
To add a node:
- Copy the installation directory and local home directory from the stopped node to your new node.
- Start Confluence on your new node.
During the startup process Confluence will recover indexes from a running node to bring the new node up to date. - Go to
> General Configuration > Clustering and check that the new node is visible.
You should only start one node at a time. Starting up multiple nodes simultaneously can cause serious failures.
If the discovery mode is set to TCP/IP, you'll need to update the confluence.cluster.peers property in the confluence.cfg.xml file for each node so the file lists all nodes in your cluster:
<property name="confluence.cluster.peers">[node 1 IP],[node 2 IP],[node 3 IP]</property> <!-- A comma-separated list of node IP addresses, without spaces -->Removing a node
To remove a node, stop Confluence on that node. You can then remove the installation and local home directory as required.
To see the number of nodes remaining go to > General Configuration > Clustering.
Changing the node identifier
Confluence generates an identifier for each node in your cluster. You can use the confluence.cluster.node.name system property to set the node identifier on each node so that it's easier for your users and administrators to read.
See Configuring System Properties for more information on how to set the system property.
Moving to a standalone installation
If you no longer need clustering, but still want access to Data Center features, you can go back to a standalone (non-clustered) Data Center installation.
In these instructions we'll assume that you'll use one of your existing cluster nodes as your new, standalone installation. You'll also need to make some infrastructure changes as part of the switch.
We recommend completing this process in a staging environment, and running a set of functional tests, integration tests, and performance tests, before making these changes in production.
Terminology
In this guide we'll use the following terminology:
- Installation directory – The directory where you installed Confluence.
- Local home directory – The home or data directory stored locally on each cluster node (if Confluence is not running in a cluster, this is simply known as the home directory).
- Shared home directory – The directory you created that is accessible to all nodes in the cluster via the same path.
1. Shut down Confluence
Stop all cluster nodes before you proceed.
2. Configure your load balancer
Configure your load balancer to redirect traffic away from all Confluence nodes, except the node you plan to use for your standalone installation.
If you no longer need your load balancer, you can remove it at this step.
3. Move items in the cluster shared home back to local home
- Create a directory called
/shared-homein the<local home>directory on one node (if you removed this directory when you set up clustering). - Move the following directories and files from your
<shared home>directory to the<local home>/shared-homedirectory- config
- confluence.cfg.xml
- dcl-document
- dcl-document_hd
- dcl-thumbnail
- Move the remaining contents of your <shared home> directory to the root of your <local home> directory. Make sure your attachments directory is moved as part of this step.
Your cluster's shared home directory should now be empty.
Make sure you don't accidentally overwrite the confluence.cfg.xml in your local home directory. The confluence.cfg.xml file from your shared home directory doesn't contain the same parameters as the one in your local home directory.
4. Modify cluster properties
- Take a backup of the existing
<local home>/confluence.cfg.xml - Edit
<local home>/confluence.cfg.xml Change the
setupTypeparameter tocustom:Before
<setupType>cluster</setupType>After
<setupType>custom</setupType>Remove any cluster properties. These begin with
confluence.cluster.Save the file.
Start Confluence
Restart Confluence.
To confirm you're now running a standalone installation, go to > General Configuration > Clustering.
The active cluster should no longer appear. Instead, you'll see information about getting started with clustering, and the option to enable cluster mode.