How to Load Balance Mule ESB without using Mule Management Console

Question

I am working with Mule ESB and instead of using Mule Management Console (MMC). I just want to load balance so that if I am exposing my Mule ESB as a Service so in that case I don't want to use load balancer to balance my Mule ESB , because once the request will come Load Balancer, it is the single point of failure in case if it is down. So I just need a use case how to Expose Mule as a Service with Optimized Load Balancing without using MMC (Mule Management Console).

Answer 1

For load balancing incoming HTTP request, over multiple Mule instances, you will need a external loadbalancer. Mule ESB Enterprise Edition nor MMC will help you with that. You can use a commercial one, such as a F5 BIP-IP, or setup a HAProxy. To avoid the loadbalancer to be a single point of failure you can setup a redundant HAProxy .

For JMS make sure to setup a external message broker cluster and connect to it using the normal jms:inbound-endpoint that way Mule will act as a competing consumer and you will achieve load balancing of messages.

I would also advice you to have a look at "MuleSoft Blueprint: Load Balancing Mule for Scalability and Availability" that covers this. It is a bit dated but most of the information in there is still valid.

Answer 2

It's unclear what transport are you using, anyhow you have just limited number of options.

• Use Mule EE clustering feature for the VM transport.
• Use a load balancer
• Use a transport that support competing consumers like JMS or AMQP.

Could you provide a more detailed explanation of you deployment so I can provide more extact info?