Question About Virtual IP Support in WildFly HA

[Omar El Kabous]

Hello WildFly Team,

I have a question regarding WildFly High Availability and Virtual IP (VIP) support.

Suppose I have two WildFly instances configured with standalone-full-ha.xml and clustered using JGroups/Infinispan:

• Node 1: 192.168.1.100:8180
• Node 2: 192.168.1.101:8180

My understanding from the WildFly documentation is that JGroups provides cluster communication and Infinispan provides session replication, but that a separate load balancer (such as Apache HTTPD with mod_cluster, HAProxy, NGINX, F5, etc.) is required to expose a single Virtual IP (VIP) or endpoint to clients.

Could you please confirm whether the following statement is correct?

Can two standalone WildFly instances, configured with standalone-full-ha.xml and JGroups clustering only (without any external load balancer, proxy, Windows NLB, Keepalived, or similar infrastructure), expose a single Virtual IP (VIP) that clients can connect to?

If the answer is no, could you please clarify which component is responsible for providing the VIP in a standard WildFly HA architecture?

Thank you for your time and clarification.

Kind regards,
Omar

[Paul Ferraro]

On Friday, July 31, 2026 at 2:58:18 PM UTC+1 Omar El Kabous wrote:

Hello WildFly Team,

I have a question regarding WildFly High Availability and Virtual IP (VIP) support.

Suppose I have two WildFly instances configured with standalone-full-ha.xml and clustered using JGroups/Infinispan:

• Node 1: 192.168.1.100:8180
• Node 2: 192.168.1.101:8180

My understanding from the WildFly documentation is that JGroups provides cluster communication and Infinispan provides session replication, but that a separate load balancer (such as Apache HTTPD with mod_cluster, HAProxy, NGINX, F5, etc.) is required to expose a single Virtual IP (VIP) or endpoint to clients.

Could you please confirm whether the following statement is correct?

Can two standalone WildFly instances, configured with standalone-full-ha.xml and JGroups clustering only (without any external load balancer, proxy, Windows NLB, Keepalived, or similar infrastructure), expose a single Virtual IP (VIP) that clients can connect to?

The network interfaces used by clients is managed separately from the network interface used for cluster communication.

Can you expose both public interfaces via a single virtual IP for client requests?  Sure, but why would you want to do that?

[luca stancapiano]

Hi Paul,

That makes sense: the client-facing network interface is managed separately from the cluster communication interface. So while it is technically possible to expose both public interfaces through a single virtual IP for client requests, that would not be provided by WildFly itself.

In a standard WildFly HA setup, the VIP or single client entry point is typically handled by external infrastructure such as a load balancer, reverse proxy, or failover mechanism. WildFly/JGroups/Infinispan cover clustering, communication, and replication, but not VIP management.

Best regards,

Luca

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