About inter-system cluster communications

VCS uses the cluster interconnect for network communications between cluster systems. Each system runs as an independent unit and shares information at the cluster level. On each system the VCS High Availability Daemon (HAD), which is the decision logic for the cluster, maintains a view of the cluster configuration. This daemon operates as a replicated state machine, which means all systems in the cluster have a synchronized state of the cluster configuration. This is accomplished by the following:

The replicated state machine communicates over a purpose-built communications package consisting of two components, Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast (GAB) and Low Latency Transport (LLT).

Cluster communications with replicated state machine illustrates the overall communications paths between two systems of the replicated state machine model.

Cluster communications with replicated state machine

Cluster communications with replicated state machine

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Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast (GAB)

The Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast protocol (GAB) is responsible for cluster membership and reliable cluster communications. GAB has two major functions.

Low Latency Transport (LLT)

The Low Latency Transport protocol is used for all cluster communications as a high-performance, low-latency replacement for the IP stack. LLT has two major functions.

The heartbeat signal is defined as follows:

Heartbeat in the cluster

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LLT can be configured to designate specific cluster interconnect links as either high priority or low priority. High priority links are used for cluster communications to GAB as well as heartbeat signals. Low priority links, during normal operation, are used for heartbeat and link state maintenance only, and the frequency of heartbeats is reduced to 50% of normal to reduce network overhead.

If there is a failure of all configured high priority links, LLT will switch all cluster communications traffic to the first available low priority link. Communication traffic will revert back to the high priority links as soon as they become available.

While not required, best practice recommends to configure at least one low priority link, and to configure two high priority links on dedicated cluster interconnects to provide redundancy in the communications path. Low priority links are typically configured on the public or administrative network.