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| About Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast (GAB) | ||
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| Prev | About inter-system cluster communications | Next |
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| About Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast (GAB) | ||
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| Prev | About inter-system cluster communications | Next |
The Group Membership Services/Atomic Broadcast protocol (GAB) is responsible for cluster membership and reliable cluster communications.
GAB has the following two major functions:
Cluster membership
GAB maintains cluster membership by receiving input on the status of the heartbeat from each system via LLT. When a system no longer receives heartbeats from a cluster peer, LLT passes the heartbeat loss notification to GAB. GAB marks the peer as DOWN and excludes it from the cluster. In most configurations, membership arbitration is used to prevent network partitions.
Cluster communications
GAB's second function is reliable cluster communications. GAB provides ordered guaranteed delivery of messages to all cluster systems. The Atomic Broadcast functionality is used by HAD to ensure that all systems within the cluster receive all configuration change messages, or are rolled back to the previous state, much like a database atomic commit. While the communications function in GAB is known as Atomic Broadcast, no actual network broadcast traffic is generated. An Atomic Broadcast message is a series of point to point unicast messages from the sending system to each receiving system, with a corresponding acknowledgement from each receiving system.