What is the difference between a fabric container and a standalone container?

While going through Redhat Fuse ESB documentation , I found mention of fabric containers as something different from stand-alone container. Are Fabric containers virtual/logical containers?

Link : https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Fuse_ESB_Enterprise/7.1/html/Deploying_into_the_Container/files/FESBLocateFabric.html

Solution

Fabric containers are real JVMs that are started and controlled by Fabric servers. They are not 'virtual' containers but are real JVM processes.

Standalone containers are single JVMs that monitor their "deploy" folder by default to look for artifacts to deploy. You can start a standalone Fuse server by simply running bin/fuse. This server will not contact any other Fuse servers.

A Fabric is a clustered group of Fuse instances. Because the cluster needs to distribute its artifacts according to some configuration it doesn't look at its deploy folder anymore (it ignores the contents) but uses "profiles" which are stored on the Fabric servers. If you would create a cluster of 3 hardware servers, you would run 3 fabric servers on them.

On the first server, you start Fuse by running bin/start.
Then run bin/client -r 10 to connect to the server.
You now still have a standalone instance. To turn it into a Fabric server run fabric:create --clean --wait-for-provisioning

On the other two servers, you start Fuse the same way, but instead of running fabric:create you run fabric:join with the relevant arguments to have them connect to the first server.

You'll notice that when you look at the administration console of the first server you'll see the other 2 servers as well, and you will be able to start fabric containers on any one of those 3 servers. You can also attach profiles to those containers.