Install and Set Up Without Mirth® Appliance by NextGen Healthcare

This section instructs you how to install and set up advanced clustering without Mirth® Appliance by NextGen Healthcare.

1. Prepare a highly available database to be used as the cluster's shared database. Supported databases for clustering are the same as Mirth® Connect itself:
   • PostgreSQL 8.3+
   • MySQL 5.0+
   • Oracle 10gR2+
   • SQL Server 2005+
2. Modify the database connection settings on each server to point to your highly available database.
   

3. Open the Mirth® Connect Administrator on each server, and install the Advanced Clustering plugin zip file (that you downloaded from the Success Community under the Extensions section.
4. To view clustering-related messages in the Mirth® Connect server log, do one of the following:
   • For releases 4.0 and earlier, add the following entries to the /conf/log4j.properties file on each Mirth® Connect instance:

     #Clustering 
       log4j.logger.com.mirth.connect.plugins.clustering = INFO
       log4j.logger.com.mirth.connect.plugins.clusteringadvanced = INFO
       log4j.logger.com.mirth.connect.plugins.clusteringbasic = INFO

   • For releases 4.1 and later, add the following entries to the /conf/log4j2.properties file on each Mirth® Connect instance:

     # Clustering
     logger.clustering.name = com.mirth.connect.plugins.clustering
     logger.clustering.level = INFO
     logger.clusteringadvanced.name = com.mirth.connect.plugins.clusteringadvanced
     logger.clusteringadvanced.level = INFO
     logger.clusteringbasic.name = com.mirth.connect.plugins.clusteringbasic
     logger.clusteringbasic.level = INFO

5. Set up a software or hardware load-balancer to direct traffic to your cluster.
6. Create alerts using advanced alerting to notify your load balancer when servers join or leave the cluster.
   

   Note: When the Advanced Clustering plugin is installed alongside the Advanced Alerting plugin, the trigger type Node State appears on the Edit Alert page - Trigger drop-down menu. You can create an alert to trigger when a node comes online or offline, and send a message to a channel which then uses a JavaScript Reader destination to invoke a script that notifies your external load balancer.

   For assistance in configuring this type of alert, go to Success Community and open a case with NextGen Connected Health Support.