Snippet from a separate exchange, where Bela Ban is replying to me, that I want to merge into this thread:
>
>> Jason, as discussed in that thread I was thinking that for AS 7 in the
>> domain model we should make "name" be a required attribute of the
>> server element.
>>
>> [1] https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBAS-7779
>> [2] http://community.jboss.org/message/529257#529257
>
> If name is required, then that's fine, but that makes deploying of JBoss
> instances dynamically (e.g. in a cloud) difficult.
>
Yes, that's the flaw in the idea; the thing that needs to be worked out.
Servers will be able to join a domain dynamically, passing any required information to the DomainController as they register themselves. The name info would have to come from the command line. So this would mean forcing whatever tool is spinning up new instances on the cloud to generate and pass a synthetic name. TBH, having our own code generate a synthetic name (e.g. a UUID) in such a case seems reasonable.
The tricky part is the domain.xml is meant to be a persistent store of configuration info for all nodes in a domain. So once you spin up a dynamic node like that, it has an entry in domain.xml. Over time your domain.xml will fill up with useless entries.
Each named server would also get it's own writable work area on its local filesystem (which will let your https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/MODCLUSTER-147 approach work); over time a local filesystem could get littered with discarded write areas. This would probably be less of an issue with cloud-based deployments. It's more of a problem if people continually launch unnamed servers from the same filesystem image.
These issues aren't unsolvable; just need some thought.