Once you have the database in place, it's time to enable Openfire to scale. There are two methods that you can use to enable Openfire to scale and handle a large number of users. One of the methods involves forming a cluster of Openfire servers and nodes. Due to the way the cluster is implemented in Openfire Enterprise, which we'll see and discuss later, this solution requires an external database. The other scaling method involves deploying a bunch of connection managers. This solution was borne out of an old Openfire limitation, but lives on as a cost-effective solution to equip Openfire to handle thousands of users.
In the following sections we'll look at setting up both of these implementations as well as optimizing them to meet our needs via other network services.