Concept of Cluster

Prepared By: Vinutha C

Concept of Cluster:-

What is Server Cluster?

A server cluster is a group of independent servers running Windows Server 2003, Enterprise
Edition, or Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, and working together as a single system
to provide high availability of services for clients. When a failure occurs on one computer in a
cluster, resources are redirected and the workload is redistributed to another computer in the
cluster. We can use server clusters to ensure that users have constant access to important server-
based resources.

Terminologies:
Nodes – Nodes are the individual physical servers, which hold all the files and data.
Shared Drive – It is an external disk drive physically plugged into all nodes in the cluster. IT
store data, applications, resources and services..
Public Network: It is a network through which client access to the Nodes of the Cluster
Internal network: It is a network via which the inter node communication occurs.
Quorum: It is a resource which stores the cluster configuration, database, checkpoints and
recovery log. Usually a separate disk is dedicated for a quorum.
Virtual Server – A Virtual server is a group that has an IP address, a network name and the
applications to be accessed by the clients of the Virtual Server
Resources implies –
1. Physical hardware devices – disk drives,
2. Logical entities – IP addresses, network names, applications and services.
Failover – It is a process of moving a group of resources from one node to another manually or
automatic.
Failback – It is a process of returning a group of resources from one node to the node on which it
was running before the failover occurred

Introduction to Server Clusters

A cluster consists of two or more computers working together to provide a higher level of
availability, reliability, and scalability than can be obtained by using a single computer.
Microsoft cluster technologies guard against three specific types of failure:
Application and service failures, which affect application software and essential services.
System and hardware failures, which affect hardware components such as CPUs,
drives, memory, network adapters, and power supplies.
Site failures in multisite organizations, which can be caused by natural disasters, power
outages, or connectivity outages.
Availability of Cluster is the quality of the system’s response to the user or process request. The
ability to handle failure allows server clusters to meet requirements for high availability, which is
the ability to provide users with access to a service for a high percentage of time while reducing
unscheduled outages.
In a server cluster, each server owns and manages its local devices and has a copy of the
operating system and the applications or services that the cluster is managing. Devices common
to the cluster, such as disks in common disk arrays and the connection media for accessing those
disks, are owned and managed by only one server at a time. For most server clusters, the
application data is stored on disks in one of the common disk arrays, and this data is accessible
only to the server that currently owns the corresponding application or service.
Server clusters are designed so that the servers in the cluster work together to protect data, keep
applications and services running after failure on one of the servers, and maintain consistency of
the cluster configuration over time.

Types of Server Clusters

There are two types of server clusters, based on how the cluster systems, called nodes, are
connected to the devices that store the cluster configuration and state data. This data must be
stored in a way that allows each active node to obtain the data even if one or more nodes are
down. The data is stored on a resource called the quorum resource.

The data on the quorum resource includes a set of cluster configuration information plus records
(sometimes called checkpoints) of the most recent changes made to that configuration. A node
coming online after an outage can use the quorum resource as the definitive source for recent
changes in the configuration.
The sections that follow describe the three different types of server clusters:
Single Quorum Device Cluster (standard quorum cluster)

Majority Node Set Cluster

Single Quorum Device Cluster

The most widely used cluster type is the single quorum device cluster, also called the standard
quorum cluster. In this type of cluster there are multiple nodes with one or more cluster disk
arrays, also called the cluster storage, and a connection device, that is, a bus. Each disk in the
array is owned and managed by only one server at a time. The disk array also contains the
quorum resource. The following figure illustrates a single quorum device cluster with one cluster
disk array.
Single Quorum Device Cluster

Because single quorum device clusters are the most widely used cluster, this Technical
Reference focuses on this type of cluster.

Majority Node Set Cluster

Windows Server 2003 supports another type of cluster, the majority node set cluster. In a
majority node set cluster, each node maintains its own copy of the cluster configuration data. The
quorum resource keeps configuration data consistent across the nodes. For this reason, majority
node set clusters can be used for geographically dispersed clusters. Another advantage of
majority node set clusters is that a quorum disk can be taken offline for maintenance and the
cluster as a whole will continue to operate.
The major difference between majority node set clusters and single quorum device clusters is
that single quorum device clusters can operate with just one node, but majority node set clusters
need to have a majority of the cluster nodes available for the server cluster to operate. The
following figure illustrates a majority node set cluster. For the cluster in the figure to continue to
operate, two of the three cluster nodes (a majority) must be available.

Majority Node Set Cluster

This Technical Reference focuses on the single quorum device cluster.

Further Clusters also classified as:
Active – Active Cluster

Active – Passive Cluster

1. Active/Active Cluster:

In an Active/Active cluster, when one node fails or is taken offline, the other node in the cluster
takes over for the failed node. There is no concept of a primary or backup node: both nodes
provide some service, should one of these nodes fail, the other must also assume the failed node's
services.However, because the failover causes the remaining node to take on additional
processing operations, the overall performance of your Exchange 2000 cluster or Exchange 2003
cluster may be reduced. For performance, availability, and scalability reasons, Active/Passive
cluster configurations are a better option than Active/Active configurations.

In a typical Active/Active cluster configuration, each node owns one Exchange virtual server.
However, if the number of Exchange virtual servers in the cluster is greater than or equal to the
number of nodes in the cluster, and even when all the Exchange virtual servers are owned by
only one node in the cluster, the cluster is still considered an Active/Active cluster.

Figure:Example Cluster in Active-Active Configuration

If a hardware or software failure occurs, the cluster automatically restarts the failed member's
services on the functional member. This service failover capability ensures that no data is lost,
and there is little disruption to users. When the failed member recovers, the cluster can re-
balance the services across the members.
In addition, you can cleanly stop the services running on a cluster system and then restart them
on another system. This service relocation capability allows you to maintain application and data
availability when a cluster member requires maintenance.

2. Active/Passive Cluster:

In case of Active Passive, one node owns the services, the other one remains inoperative. When
the primary node fails, the secondary or backup node takes the resources and reactivates the
services, while the ex-primary remains in turn inoperative. This is a configuration where only
one node is operative at any point of time in case of two node cluster.

Figure: Example Cluster in Active-Passive Configuration

 Advantages of Clusters:
 Server Clusters are designed for applications that have long-running in-memory state or
frequently updated data. Typical uses for server clusters include file servers, print servers,
database servers, and messaging servers.
 Cluster Computing can be used for load balancing as well as for high availability.
(Ensuring 99.999 availability). As traffic or availability assurance increases, all or some
parts of the cluster can be increased in size or number.
 One of the main ideas of cluster computing is that, to the outside world, the cluster
appears to be a single system.
 A common use of cluster computing is to load balance traffic on high-traffic Web sites. A
Web page request is sent to a "manager" server, which then determines which of several
identical or very similar Web servers to forward the request to for handling. Having a
Web farm (as such a configuration is sometimes called) allows traffic to be handled more
quickly.

High-availability (HA) clusters

 High-availability clusters (also known as Failover Clusters) are implemented primarily
for the purpose of improving the availability of services which the cluster provides.
 They operate by having redundant nodes, which are then used to provide service when
system components fail. The most common size for an HA cluster is two nodes, which is
the minimum requirement to provide redundancy.
 HA cluster implementations attempt to use redundancy of cluster components to
eliminate single points of failure.

 High availability (HA) cluster computing is often used in this way, to create a redundant
network which will be accessible to users at all times, with failsafes in case parts of the
cluster breakdown.

 Load balancing clusters are designed to address a large load of incoming requests,
coordinating requests in a way which will maximize efficiency and usability.

Load-balancing clusters
 Load-balancing when multiple computers are linked together to share computational
workload or function as a single virtual computer.
 Logically, from the user side, they are multiple machines, but function as a single virtual
machine. Requests initiated from the user are managed by, and distributed among, all the
standalone computers to form a cluster. This results in balanced computational work
among different machines, improving the performance of the cluster system.
Compute clusters
 Clusters are used primarily for computational purposes, rather than handling IO-oriented
operations such as web service or databases. For instance, a cluster might support
computational simulations of weather or vehicle crashes.
 The primary distinction within compute clusters is how tightly-coupled the individual
nodes are. For instance, a single compute job may require frequent communication
among nodes - this implies that the cluster shares a dedicated network, is densely located,
and probably has homogenous nodes. This cluster design is usually referred to as
Beowulf Cluster.
 The other extreme is where a compute job uses one or few nodes, and needs little or no
inter-node communication. This category is sometimes called "Grid" computing. Tightly-
coupled compute clusters are designed for work that might traditionally have been called
"supercomputing
 Cluster computing can also be used as a relatively low-cost form of parallel processing
for scientific and other applications that lend themselves to parallel operations. An early
and well-known example was the Beowulf project in which a number of off-the-shelf
PCs were used to form a cluster for scientific applications.
References:

Book: Introducing WINDOWS SERVER 2003 – Jerry Honeycutt

Book: Clustering Windows Server - Gary Mauler

www.microsoft.com