Re: [Full-disclosure] clustering question

[Bill Stout <billbrietstout@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is security related?

Clustered firewall/vpn appliances have to be the same family as they replicate 
configuration (and sometimes state info) to each other.  Usually the size of 
the appliance is related to user licenses and options like SSL accelleration, 
so from the hardware perpsective they have to have the same components.

[Early '90s' answer]  If you're talking about a firewall configuration, as long 
as the services failover differently sized systems will be fine.  The cluster 
can be full capacity when both are up, and operate in degraded capacity mode 
with all services running on one server, or if a service fails over to a 
smaller system it will run in degraded mode.  I configured a Dec Seal1 
gatekeeper cluster on Digital Ultrix for a west coast bank way back when, they 
had some services (FTP, SSL) on one server and other services on a another 
(NTP, SMTP).  The clustering software handled service (screend) and virtual IP 
failover and the configuration files on the shared RAIDset.  The systems were 
equally sized.  I haven't seen an application firewall cluster since then.

Bill Stout

----- Original Message ---- 
From: shadow floating <nadengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: full-disclosure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 5:35:17 AM 
Subject: [Full-disclosure] clustering question 

Hi all, 
just a simple question 
when i'm building a cluster, do i have to have all machines in the 
cluster be exactly the same capacity ,configuration and brand? (cpu 
power, storage,network connectivity and memory) 
thank alot 

regards, 

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_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/