High-availability Cluster - Node Configurations

Node Configurations

The most common size for an HA cluster is a two-node cluster, since that is the minimum required to provide redundancy, but many clusters consist of many more, sometimes dozens of nodes. Such configurations can sometimes be categorized into one of the following models:

• Active/active — Traffic intended for the failed node is either passed onto an existing node or load balanced across the remaining nodes. This is usually only possible when the nodes utilize a homogeneous software configuration.
• Active/passive — Provides a fully redundant instance of each node, which is only brought online when its associated primary node fails. This configuration typically requires the most extra hardware.
• N+1 — Provides a single extra node that is brought online to take over the role of the node that has failed. In the case of heterogeneous software configuration on each primary node, the extra node must be universally capable of assuming any of the roles of the primary nodes it is responsible for. This normally refers to clusters which have multiple services running simultaneously; in the single service case, this degenerates to active/passive.
• N+M — In cases where a single cluster is managing many services, having only one dedicated failover node may not offer sufficient redundancy. In such cases, more than one (M) standby servers are included and available. The number of standby servers is a tradeoff between cost and reliability requirements.
• N-to-1 — Allows the failover standby node to become the active one temporarily, until the original node can be restored or brought back online, at which point the services or instances must be failed-back to it in order to restore high availability.
• N-to-N — A combination of active/active and N+M clusters, N to N clusters redistribute the services, instances or connections from the failed node among the remaining active nodes, thus eliminating (as with active/active) the need for a 'standby' node, but introducing a need for extra capacity on all active nodes.

The terms logical host or cluster logical host is used to describe the network address which is used to access services provided by the cluster. This logical host identity is not tied to a single cluster node. It is actually a network address/hostname that is linked with the service(s) provided by the cluster. If a cluster node with a running database goes down, the database will be restarted on another cluster node, and the network address that the users use to access the database will be brought up on the new node as well so that users can access the database again.