Introduction to the Oracle Solaris Cluster Environment

The Oracle Solaris Cluster environment extends the Oracle Solaris operating system into a cluster operating system. A cluster is a collection of one or more nodes that belong exclusively to that collection.

A cluster offers several advantages over traditional single-server systems. These advantages include support for failover and scalable services, capacity for modular growth, the ability to set load limits on nodes, and a low entry price compared to traditional hardware fault-tolerant systems.

Additional benefits of the Oracle Solaris Cluster software include the following:

• Reduces or eliminates system downtime because of software or hardware failure

• Ensures availability of data and applications to end users regardless of the kind of failure that would normally take down a single-server system

• Increases application throughput by enabling services to scale to additional processors by adding nodes to the cluster and balancing load

• Provides enhanced availability of the system by enabling you to perform maintenance without shutting down the entire cluster

In a cluster that runs on the Oracle Solaris OS, a global cluster and a zone cluster are types of clusters.

• A global cluster consists of a set of Oracle Solaris global zones. A global cluster is composed of one or more global-cluster voting nodes and optionally, zero or more global-cluster non-voting nodes.

  A global-cluster voting node is a native brand global zone in a global cluster that contributes votes to the total number of quorum votes, that is, membership votes in the cluster. This total determines whether the cluster has sufficient votes to continue operating. A global-cluster non-voting node is a native brand non-global zone in a global cluster that does not contribute votes to the total number of quorum votes.

• A zone cluster consists of a set of non-global zones (one per global-cluster node), that are configured to behave as a separate “virtual” cluster.

For more information about global clusters and zone clusters, see Overview of Administering Oracle Solaris Cluster in Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide and Working With a Zone Cluster in Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide.