Hi,
as you say the project today includes some experimental support for "automatic" master election but that needs more work to be fully reliable, I expect this will need some more months.
Other than "automatic" you have the option to control the election yourself: JMS queues can be configured with persistent storage (so that the master node going down can be restarted without losing updates in the downtime), or you can setup multiple consumers.
In case of multiple consumers you need to control yourself (with custom code or integrations) how to achieve a "passive master" to get elected to active master, and force-release the lock in that case. Usually the external code/integrations are in a better position to make such a decision as it might be connected with your monitor tooling, or directly under manual control "admin needs to push the button".
In both configurations, using JMS would prevent you to lose any updates.
Quote:
I see there is some experiment feature in hibernate-search 4.3 for auto election if uses jgroups backend, but we are a commercial product, so i am afraid of such experiment feature.
Interesting, please let me know if you're willing to participate in the development or testing of these features: that's usually the best path to get a very solid implementation.