Today was the release of SailFin v2 (download, home, wiki) and its companion Sun GlassFish Communications Server 2.0 (download, home). SailFin v2 is a big release; it leverages GlassFish v2.1.1 (more tomorrow) and adds a number of features including high availability, rolling upgrade, flexible network topology, better overload protection, Diameter support, improved diagnosability, Java based DCR files for the load balancer, and more. I can't cover SailFin v2 properly but I'll collect some of the relevant links so you can follow them up.  Start with Binod's overview: SailFin v2 Released! and move from there:

Some of the major changes are:

• A new replica selection algorithm that improves scalability by easing load distribution after failure.
• Enhancements to the Converged Load Balancer to support writing DCR rules in Java.
• The ability to do rolling upgrades leverages session replication; see this example.
• Improved use of multihoming features for more flexible deployments. See Ramesh's writeup.
• Diameter support in Sun's for-fee AddOn; see details in Venu's many posts, including [1] and [2].
• Improved load protection.  See Robert's one pager and Sankar's work on JMX Notification.

As part of the release, the team has posted a number of new entries, including:

• Next is what? (Prasad)
• Subscribing to user state using Sun Diameter Sh API (Venu)
• Setup and Configure Diameter on SailFin (Naman Mehta)
• Diameter Administration on SailFIn 2.0 (Yamini KB)
• SailFin v2 Released (Srikanth Anandal)
• CLB Enhancements in SailFin 2.0 (Kshitiz Saxena)
• Overload Protection in SailFin: What's new in 2.0 (Rampsarathy)
• Tips and Tricks of SailFin HA (Bhavani Shankar)
• Multihoming in SailFin. (Ramesh)

• TA entries tagged SailFin,
• Prasad's earlier roundup: "SailFin 2.0 is Around the Corner!"
• Sreeram's notes on SailFin amazon images.
• How to write Conference App in 15 lines of nicely formatted code!

Finally, a list for PR/Press reports:

• Sun Communications Server Speaks VoIP (The H Open Source)
• Barron's, BusinesWire.

Note - GlassFish v2.1.1 is also available from Sun's Download Center and from the Community Site. More on that release tomorrow. And the OpenMQ 4.4 (and 4.4.1 RC1) are available from here.

Rolling upgrade is a necessary feature to avert system down time. Needless to say that it is very important for telco environments. In his latest blog entry, Bhavani explains the rolling upgrade support in Sailfin V2. The newly added SailFin HA sample has been enhanced to demonstrate rolling upgrade also.

Session replication is used to prevent loss of sessions during rolling upgrade (and also in case of a failure). Sreedhar explains the new replica selection algorithm used in SailFin V2 and its benefits. Check it out!

Improving the clustering and high availability has been the focus of SailFin V2. Now, a new 3PCC (Third party call control) converged sample application demonstrating the session failover feature of sailfin has been integrated. The 3PCC sample has been written to follow the guidelines from RFC 3725. The sample has been bundled with nightly builds, from today. Take a look at Bhavani's bogs here for details.

SailFin is closing on v2.0 which is aligned with GlassFish v2.1.1 (both scheduled for the end of October, see Roadmap) and the team has been highlighting new features in the release: • Prasad Announces HCF, provides an overview and a List of Fixes since SCF. • Shreedhar writes about the Support for SSR (SIP Session Replication). • Ramesh describes the Configuration Options, including DNS failover and Converged LB. • Prateek Announces a new AMIs for SailFin based on OpenSolaris.   (also see EC2 Blog and Full List of Sun's AMIs)

Last month, John and Shreedhar gave a free webinar on High Availability through Load Balancing of GlassFish Clusters. The presentation was well attended, see posts from John and from an attendee, Daniel-Noz, and the recording of the webinar is now available. As part of an effort to improve the effectiveness of this and other GF Portfolio Resources, I've created a very short Feedback Survey; please consider using it to help us help you.

And, if you are interested in this topic, also check out this White Paper Application Scalability and Fault Tolerance with GlassFish Load Balancer (and companion survey).

Clustering - supported in GlassFish since Sept 2007 - will be further improved in the GFv2.1 release (companion to SailFin). One of the improvements is Apache 2.2 support and Kshitiz has written an good writeup on the configuration steps and mentions the automated support also. Clustering is used for horizontal scalability and high availability; interest and use of the feature is increasing quickly with GlassFish deployments. Check the official documentation and our recent White Paper on HA. Also, Satyajit just put together a set of slides on the topic (writeup, PDF@SLX, SlideShare).

We will cover Clustering in a future TA Online event; the Seam Online Event on Thursday went very well and I think the new format with multiple, shorter, presentations around a single topic is well suited to this new medium.

Sun has published a new White Paper showing how to combine the GlassFish Server with Solaris 10 Containers on Sun Fire T2000 servers to implement high available solutions under different topologies. The benefits of this arrangement includes benefits from the open source of GF as well as the manageability and price/performance and power-consumption/performance of Containers/CMT. The White Paper is free but requires registration. The authors are from the core HA group at Sun.

GlassFish has had mod_jk support since GFv1; a common use case is where Apache httpd server is serving static pages and delegating to GlassFish for dynamic content.

The any-day-now GFv2 UR1 release also supports the case where httpd works as a load balancer to a cluster of GF instances, and Jan's latest note describes in detail how this works out.

Jan's entry not just describes how to configure httpd and GF but it also includes an architectural overview, explaining how jvmRoute works in the load balancer scheme used by httpd as well as how it was implemented. Check it out!

Linda has two new posts; one builds on her popular JMS 101 introduction; in the Follow-up Entry she expands the hello world example to use JNDI and administered objects. The second entry is more advanced and covers High Availability in JMS. Linda talks about brokers, clusters, and stores in the OpenMQ implementation and points to the future directions for the project. The OpenMQ team is always interested in your comments at USERS@mq; the binaries are included in GlassFish and separately at their Download Page. Enjoy!