Scalable Data Services

The scalable data service has the potential for active instances on multiple nodes or zones.

Scalable services use the following two resource groups:

• A scalable resource group contains the application resources.

• A failover resource group, which contains the network resources (shared addresses) on which the scalable service depends. A shared address is a network address. This network address can be bound by all scalable services that are running on nodes or zones within the cluster. This shared address enables these scalable services to scale on those nodes or zones. A cluster can have multiple shared addresses, and a service can be bound to multiple shared addresses.

A scalable resource group can be online on multiple nodes or zones simultaneously. As a result, multiple instances of the service can be running at once. However, a scalable resource group that uses a shared address to balance the service load between nodes can be online in only one zone per physical node. All scalable resource groups use load balancing. All nodes or zones that host a scalable service use the same shared address to host the service. The failover resource group that hosts the shared address is online on only one node or zone at a time.

Service requests enter the cluster through a single network interface (the global interface). These requests are distributed to the nodes or zones, based on one of several predefined algorithms that are set by the load-balancing policy. The cluster can use the load-balancing policy to balance the service load between several nodes or zones. Multiple global interfaces can exist on different nodes or zones that host other shared addresses.

For scalable services, application instances run on several nodes or zones simultaneously. If the node or zone that hosts the global interface fails, the global interface fails over to another node or zone. If an application instance that is running fails, the instance attempts to restart on the same node or zone.

If an application instance cannot be restarted on the same node or zone, and another unused node or zone is configured to run the service, the service fails over to the unused node or zone. Otherwise, the service continues to run on the remaining nodes or zones, possibly causing a degradation of service throughput.

TCP state for each application instance is kept on the node with the instance, not on the global interface node. Therefore, failure of the global interface node does not affect the connection.

Figure 3–7 shows an example of failover and a scalable resource group and the dependencies that exist between them for scalable services. This example shows three resource groups. The failover resource group contains application resources for highly available DNS, and network resources used by both highly available DNS and highly available Apache Web Server (used in SPARC-based clusters only). The scalable resource groups contain only application instances of the Apache Web Server. Note that resource group dependencies exist between the scalable and failover resource groups (solid lines). Additionally, all the Apache application resources depend on the network resource schost-2, which is a shared address (dashed lines).

Figure 3–7 SPARC: Failover and Scalable Resource Group Example