New Howto guide available: HOW to INSTALL and CONFIGURE A TWO-NODE CLUSTER

Question

Hi,
I am not sure that this has been posted or not. But for all of us who are too lazy (like myself) to read the full set of documentation, or who have not enough time, please have a look at this short document with screen shots that explains how to setup a simple two-node cluster.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/howtoguides/twonodecluster.jsp
I still recommend to browse through the "Sun Cluster Concepts Guide for Solaris OS" http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-0421
Have fun
Hartmut

Answer 1

I am afraid there is no such document. But I can try to give you some hints.
N+1 can be seen as two things:
- the phsical setup of the cluster and
- the logical configuration of services
A physical N+1 setup would mean, that you have one server that is connected to all shared storage, but the other N nodes are only connected to the shared storage they need.
This configuration would also need the logical N+1 setup, namely that all HA services could only run on 2 nodes, their primary node and as a backup this one dedicated node that is connected to all shared storage.
If you do not have the physical N+1 setup, you could easily have a logical N+1 setup, by having a N*N topology, j.e. all nodes connected to all storage, but logically each service again would have only 2 nodes on its nodelist.
It seems that the second option is the one that is used more often, as ift offers you the ability to reconfigure things in case of failures.
With regards to asymmetric and symmetric I am not quite sure what you mean: And I do not think that these terms are used in the SC docs.
What I can think of is, that asymmetric means that you have one node being active with 1 or more HA services and have one inactive secondary node as a backup.
Regards
Hartmut