Single server

RabbitMQ 3.1.5

Erlang 19

RabbitMQ  3.7.12 or higher

Erlang 21.2.6 or higher

Although we expect older clients to work, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest client

The oldest Java client you should use is 3.6.6.  Prior versions may force the use of the unsupported TLS 1.0, regardless of Java version and settings.

Need to determine how SSL certification verification should be implemented given these warnings from later clients:

WARN [localhost-startStop-1] com.rabbitmq.client.TrustEverythingTrustManager.<init> SECURITY ALERT: this trust manager trusts every certificate, effectively disabling peer verification. This is convenient for local development but offers no protection against man-in-the-middle attacks. Please see https://www.rabbitmq.com/ssl.html to learn more about peer certificate verification.

Default is 65535 seconds (18.2 hours)

You need to set the AMQP heartbeat on your client settings to 60 seconds so that it matches the server's expectations. Otherwise, the server may think that you are no longer connected.

Here's a Java example: https://www.rabbitmq.com/heartbeats.html#using-heartbeats-in-java

This smaller heartbeat value will generate network traffic every 60s, thus preventing network devices from dropping your connection when it is idle.

If your RabbitMQ client does not already do this for you, you should have code that handles dropped connections to the broker.  The code should repeatedly attempt to reconnect until it's successful, and if applicable, retry the interrupted operation.

No change. Continue doing the same.

If you are not currently doing this, you should, but it's usually only an issue for those who have persistent connections to the broker (continuously consuming messages from their queue). 

Don't worry too much about this if you connect-consume-and-disconnect on a daily or hourly basis.

WARNING: if you have your own code that reconnects, check whether your version of the RabbitMQ client is also capable of reconnecting, especially if you're upgrading from a really old version.  You should only have one entity perform the handling of lost connections, otherwise you may end up with multiple re-connections for each connection that was lost.

This is how the RabbitMQ client recovers from network failures:
https://www.rabbitmq.com/api-guide.html#recovery

Note: It is possible to have a lost connection in a "zombie" state while at the same time having a newly created recovery connection.  To speed up the clean up of the zombie connection, you should set the recovery retry interval to 3 times the heartbeat value.   To further reduce the likelihood of zombies, you could set the heartbeat to 30 seconds and the recovery retry interval to 90s.  See also https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rabbitmq-users/7AZz4Nr0_Rk

This is a single server, so any major failure could cause the broker to be unavailable for several minutes or hours.

The broker should come back within 16 seconds.

If you set your dropped connection retry interval to 16 seconds, that should result in a successful re-connection after any dropped connection.

Queues are mirrored and synchronized across all 3 nodes unless the queue name begins with an underscore.

Mirroring allows your queue to be serviced by any node when you reconnect to the cluster after a failure.

Mirroring uses up more resources, especially when it's a large test queue that hardly gets consumed.  You can skip mirroring for such test queues by using an underscore as the first character in the queue name.