Cluster Partnerships

A partnership establishes heartbeat monitoring between two clusters that are running Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software. Clusters in a partnership exchange heartbeats to monitor each other's presence and health. You can configure a partnership between only two clusters, and only one partnership can be defined between the clusters. The two clusters must have an Internet connection with each other. A partnership establishes heartbeats between the clusters.

The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software uses the IP interconnect between partner clusters for management as well as heartbeats. The IP interconnect can be secured via IPsec for additional security when a public network is in use.

The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software enables you to specify a command to execute when a heartbeat-loss notification is issued. This command is executed with root permissions. You can also specify a list of email addresses to notify when a heartbeat-loss notification has been issued.

The following figure illustrates a partnership between two clusters.

Figure 2–1 Partnerships Between Clusters

A single cluster can participate in more than one partnership with other clusters, but two clusters cannot be in more than one partnership with each other.