Sunday, August 2, 2009

What happens when both heartbeat cables are unplugged from Sun Cluster nodes?

I deployed a Sun Cluster for a local defense customer a few months ago. On Friday, the engineer called to ask:

What happens when both heartbeat cables (Cluster Private Interconnect) are unplugged?



Above is a typical logical network diagram for a Sun Cluster deployment. (In fact, I use the same diagram for all cluster projects :> Just make sure the hostnames and NIC interfaces are named appropriately for that particular customer)

The answer is simple:

Whichever node that loses the vote from the Quorum Device will go into panic mode. The winning node will survive. If the Resource Group was with the losing node, then it will be failover to the winning node.
The key thing is note is:

There is 50-50% chance that a node will win. Thus we can never configure the cluster such that a particular node will always lose if the heartbeat cables are unplugged.

By the way, this scenario almost never happen before. Imagine the configuration is such that there are 2 heartbeat cables connected to 2 separate NIC cards on each node. You'll strike lottery if this scenario really happens!


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