vFabric RabbitMQ, based on the open source RabbitMQ project, has significantly updated the underlying RabbitMQ version to 2.8.1 in the latest VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 update. 

The new vFabric RabbitMQ release represents a significant upgrade from the open source RabbitMQ 2.4.1 that vFabric 5.0 was based on, and brings the commercially supported vFabric RabbitMQ to parity with recent open source RabbitMQ releases by rolling up all of the interim code changes. Furthermore, users now have the option of choosing to use the commercially bundled vFabric RabbitMQ from VMware or using the open source RabbitMQ distribution with a single license. Either way a user chooses, they can receive the same reliable support from VMware.

Performance Improvements

• New internal message flow control to limit memory use and make performance more predictable if the server is overloaded
• Recovery has been simplified, improving startup times when many exchanges or bindings exist
• Better performance under high load and memory pressure
• Improved inbound network performance
• Improved routing performance
• Significant performance improvements to connection creation, durable queues, message storage, and large numbers of consumers

Reliability Improvements

• Active-Active HA with queues replicated across nodes in a cluster to improve reliability
• New dead letter queue for handling undelivered or expired messages – queues can specify an exchange to which messages should be redirected when they are rejected or expire
• Bindings are recovered between durable queues and non-durable exchanges on restart of individual cluster nodes
• Order preserved of messages re-queued for a consumer
• Fixes to queue recovery and high availability node recovery

New Features

• Plugins are included in the main rabbitmq-server release, with a new command, rabbitmq-plugins, to enable and disable them

• Tracing facility for debugging incoming and outgoing messages, (see firehose)
• New rabbitmqctl commands ('report', 'environment', and 'cluster_status')
• Routing topology visualiser
• Clients accept a new "AMQP" URI scheme for connections
• Thread-safe Java client consumer callbacks

vFabric RabbitMQ can now be managed in the same way as your entire vFabric
deployment using vFabric Administration Server 1.0. By interacting with the REST endpoints on vFabric Administration Server, you can easily manage vFabric RabbitMQ on one node or groups of nodes and monitor the progress of management tasks being executed.

New Book – RabbitMQ in Action

If you are new to RabbitMQ, the book RabbitMQ in Action has been published and is for sale with a 37% discount to readers of the RabbitMQ Blog. Besides the discount, this post also covers some of the key functionality and example code on Github.

To try out vFabric RabbitMQ, you can download a 60 day free trial, as part of vFabric Suite Advanced, at www.vfabric.co/try.

About the Author: Charles Lee is currently a VMware product manager of several products, including Cloud Foundry and the vFabric Suite. Lee was a co-founder of Hyperic, before Hyperic was acquired by SpringSource, which was then subsequently acquired by VMware.