Clustering Geoserver with shared session

Question

I have succeed in clustering geoserver on windows using three Apache tomcat instances and Apache server as load balancer. I also shared the data directory but I have two issues:

1. when I try to login in the geoserver through the load balancer, I failed to login although the username and password are correct and I didn't get any error message. And when I logged in geoserver through any instance of tomcat, the geoserver through the load balancer didn't login.

2. when I upload a layer on an instance of geoservers, the others didn't sync until I reload the configuration of each one.

Answer 1

Both of those issues are as expected.

1. GeoServer and HTTP are stateless so each time you go through the load balancer you end up at a different GeoServer (that you may or may not have logged into).

2. Unless you have installed a clustering extension then each GeoServer will be distinct and will not realise that you have changed it's data dir remotely. Also all sorts of bad things can occur if you change the same layer on two machines at once, so we tend to discourage this.

Please read (and work through) the excellent GeoSolutions' training course on Clustering GeoServer to see how this should be done.