Services deployed normally inside deploy or farm that want to be started/stopped whenever the content of deploy-hasingleton gets deployed/undeployed, (i.e., whenever the current node becomes the master), need only specify a dependency on the Barrier mbean:

<depends>jboss.ha:service=HASingletonDeployer,type=Barrier</depends> 

The way it works is that a BarrierController is deployed along with the jboss.ha:service=HASingletonDeployer MBean and listens for JMX notifications from it. A BarrierController is a relatively simple Mbean that can subscribe to receive any JMX notification in the system. It uses the received notifications to control the lifecycle of a dynamically created Mbean called the Barrier.The Barrier is instantiated, registered and brought to the CREATE state when the BarrierController is deployed. After that, the BarrierController starts and stops the Barrier when matching JMX notifications are received. Thus, other services need only depend on the Barrier MBean using the usual <depends> tag, and they will be started and stopped in tandem with the Barrier. When the BarrierController is undeployed the Barrier is destroyed too.

This provides an alternative to the deploy-hasingleton approach in that we can use farming to distribute the service, while content in deploy-hasingleton must be copied manually on all nodes.

On the other hand, the barrier-dependent service will be instantiated/created (i.e., any create() method invoked) on all nodes, but only started on the master node. This is different with the deploy-hasingleton approach that will only deploy (instantiate/create/start) the contents of the deploy-hasingleton directory on one of the nodes.

So services depending on the barrier will need to make sure they do minimal or no work inside their create() step, rather they should use start() to do the work.