Account Links: Cart | Register | Log In

Skip to content

Hardware Configuration Guidelines

Cluster Suite configurations deliver high availability and performance using a mixture of software and hardware. While the software components are all included in the Red Hat Cluster Suite product, selection of appropriate hardware for the configuration should be done as part of the overall system design. Most cluster hardware is self-certified for use with Red Hat Cluster Suite by hardware suppliers, so please contact your hardware vendor for specific product details. A list of Red Hat certified hardware components is maintained at http://hardware.redhat.com/.

Cluster Manager

For the Cluster Manager capability the following hardware components must be selected:

A storage subsystem.

The storage subsystem is at the heart of the cluster configuration. Since all servers in the cluster will access data located on the shared storage subsystem it is important that it offer high availability through technologies such as RAID. Selecting a storage subsystem involves three steps:

  1. Selecting a storage technology.
    Cluster Manager systems can be configured using SCSI or Fibre Channel hardware. In general, SCSI will be appropriate for smaller configurations with 2-4 servers, while Fibre Channel is better suited to larger configurations.
  2. Choosing a Host Bus Adapter (HBA).
    Red Hat Cluster Suite imposes no specific requirements on the host I/O adapter, so any adapter supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be used in a cluster configuration. (Note that HBAs that provide RAID capabilities cannot be used in Cluster Manager systems because products currently on the market do not support multihost configurations.) SCSI and Fibre Channel host adapters from all the major suppliers are supported, including:
  3. Choosing an external shared storage array/controller
    The storage controller must support concurrent access to any disk from multiple hosts. Also, SCSI storage controllers must provide electrically separate SCSI ports for each connected host server (multi-host SCSI bus configurations are not supported). Provided these requirements are met any good quality storage controller can be expected to work with Red Hat Cluster Suite, including products from:

    To ensure that application data is continuously available it is recommended that the storage controller provide high availability features such as RAID, redundant controllers, mirrored data cache, and battery backup.

A power control subsystem.

This subsystem is required to ensure high levels of data integrity and unattended application failover. The power control subsystem allows operational cluster nodes to control the power of failed nodes to ensure that they do not access storage in an uncoordinated manner. Power control systems are network-based, and are available from the following vendors:

Load Balancing

The IP Load Balancing capability that is provided as part of Red Hat Cluster Suite has no specific hardware requirements beyond standard network connectivity. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports Network Channel Bonding, so performance can be improved by configuring multiple network adapters in each cluster node.