To set JDBC_PING JGroups discovery protocol, a dependency to a JDBC driver module must be added to the module.xml of JGroups. But this will cause an issue when patching or upgrading.

datasource_jndi_name property can be configured to JDGC_PING. But the server fails to start because the datasource is sometimes not available when JGroups initialized.

To overcome the JNDI issue, JBEAP-4911 has been implemented in EAP 7.1. We can write something like <protocol type="JDBC_PING" data-source="ExampleDS"/> with a proper service dependency. Please consider to upgrade EAP to 7.1.