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. For additional security when a public network is in use, use IPsec to secure the IP interconnect.

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.