Cluster Membership

The Cluster Membership Monitor (CMM) is a distributed set of agents that exchange messages over the cluster interconnect to complete the following tasks:

• Enforcing a consistent membership view on all nodes (quorum)

• Driving synchronized reconfiguration in response to membership changes

• Handling cluster partitioning

• Ensuring full connectivity among all cluster members by leaving unhealthy nodes out of the cluster until they are repaired

The main function of the CMM is to establish cluster membership, which requires a cluster-wide agreement on the set of nodes that participate in the cluster at any time. The CMM detects major cluster status changes on each node, such as loss of communication between one or more nodes. The CMM relies on the transport kernel module to generate heartbeats across the transport medium to other nodes in the cluster. When the CMM does not detect a heartbeat from a node within a defined timeout period, the CMM considers the node to have failed and the CMM initiates a cluster reconfiguration to renegotiate cluster membership.

To determine cluster membership and to ensure data integrity, the CMM performs the following tasks:

• Accounting for a change in cluster membership, such as a node's joining or leaving the cluster

• Ensuring that an unhealthy node leaves the cluster

• Ensuring that an unhealthy node remains inactive until it is repaired

• Preventing the cluster from partitioning itself into subsets of nodes

See Split Brain and Amnesia for more information about how the cluster protects itself from partitioning into multiple separate clusters.