Migrate from a standalone Synchrony cluster to managed Synchrony

If you have a Confluence Data Center license, and enabled collaborative editing prior to Confluence 6.12, you will likely be running standalone Synchrony, either in it's own cluster, or manually on each Confluence node. 

If you'd prefer a simpler setup, with less ongoing maintenance, you can choose to let Confluence manage Synchrony for you. Confluence will automatically start up a Synchrony process when Confluence is started. 

Some Confluence downtime is required for this process.

To switch from managing your own Synchrony cluster to letting Confluence manage Synchrony:

  1. Configure your load balancer to direct traffic away from all Confluence and Synchrony nodes.
  2. Stop Confluence and Synchrony on all nodes.
  3. Remove the the synchrony.service.url system property. This property tells Confluence where to find your external Synchrony cluster.

    Show me how to do this...

    The way you remove this system property depends on how you run Confluence.  Note that this system property is passed to Confluence, not Synchrony itself. 

    If you start Confluence manually on Windows, edit the <install directory>/bin/setenv.bat file and remove the following line:

    set CATALINA_OPTS=-Dsynchrony.service.url=http://example-synchrony.com/synchrony/v1 %CATALINA_OPTS%

    If you start Confluence manually on Linux, edit the <install directory>/bin/setenv.sh file and remove the following line:

    CATALINA_OPTS="-Dsynchrony.service.url=http://example-synchrony.com/synchrony/v1 ${CATALINA_OPTS}"

    If you're running as a Confluence as a Windows Service, you'll need to edit the service and remove the following from the Java options:

    -Dsynchrony.service.url=http://example-synchrony.com/synchrony/v1

    See Configuring System Properties for a step-by-step guide to passing system properties to Windows services via the command line or Windows Registry. 

  4. Set the synchrony.memory.max system property to increase the maximum heap memory available to Synchrony to 2gb (or the amount of memory previously allocated to the Synchrony standalone service).

    Show me how to do this...

    The way you set this system property depends on how you run Confluence.  Note that this system property is passed to Confluence, not Synchrony itself. 

    If you start Confluence manually on Windows, edit the <install directory>/bin/setenv.bat file and remove the following line:

    set CATALINA_OPTS=-Dsynchrony.memory.max=2g %CATALINA_OPTS%

    If you start Confluence manually on Linux, edit the <install directory>/bin/setenv.sh file and remove the following line:

    CATALINA_OPTS="-Dsynchrony.memory.max=2g ${CATALINA_OPTS}"

    If you're running as a Confluence as a Windows Service, you'll need to edit the service and remove the following from the Java options:

    -Dsynchrony.memory.max=2g

    See Configuring System Properties for a step-by-step guide to passing system properties to Windows services via the command line, Windows Registry, or in AWS. 

  5. Make sure all required ports are open, especially especially 5701 and 25500 which are used by the Synchrony cluster. See Confluence Server and Data Center ports for a full list.
  6. Start Confluence on one node. 
  7. In Confluence, edit a page and check that you can successfully make changes. 
  8. Repeat this process on each Confluence node, starting each node one at a time

Once all nodes are back up and running, and you've confirmed that collaborative editing is working as expected, you can decommission your external Synchrony cluster, including removing any startup scripts or services you may have configured. 

Any users who had the editor open before you made this change will need to refresh in order to continue editing, as the Synchrony URL they're connected to will have changed. 

You may also need to make some changes to your load balancer configuration. See Possible Confluence and Synchrony Configurations for more information. 


Last modified on Oct 11, 2021

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