Ability to Change Global Heartbeat Parameters

The Tunable Heartbeats feature enables you to change the global heartbeat parameters of a cluster, which effectively changes the heartbeat parameters across all the adapters of the cluster. Sun Cluster software relies on heartbeats over the private interconnect to detect communication failures among cluster nodes.

Reducing the heartbeat timeout enables Sun Cluster software to detect failures more quickly, as the time that is required to detect failures decreases when you decrease the values of heartbeat timeout. Thus, Sun Cluster software recovers more quickly from failures, consequently increasing the availability of your cluster.

The Tunable Heartbeats feature is described in more detail in the scconf(1M) man page.