Red Hat Cluster Suite Overview; Cluster Basics - Red Hat CLUSTER SUITE FOR ENTERPRISE LINUX 5.1 Overview

Chapter 1.

Red Hat Cluster Suite Overview

Clustered systems provide reliability, scalability, and availability to critical production services.
Using Red Hat Cluster Suite, you can create a cluster to suit your needs for performance, high
availability, load balancing, scalability, file sharing, and economy. This chapter provides an
overview of Red Hat Cluster Suite components and functions, and consists of the following
sections:
• Section 1, "Cluster Basics"
• Section 2, "Red Hat Cluster Suite Introduction"
• Section 3, "Cluster Infrastructure"
• Section 4, "High-availability Service Management"
• Section 5, "Red Hat GFS"
• Section 6, "Cluster Logical Volume Manager"
• Section 7, "Global Network Block Device"
• Section 8, "Linux Virtual Server"
• Section 9, "Cluster Administration Tools"
• Section 10, "Linux Virtual Server Administration GUI"

1. Cluster Basics

A cluster is two or more computers (called nodes or members) that work together to perform a
task. There are four major types of clusters:
• Storage
• High availability
• Load balancing
• High performance
Storage clusters provide a consistent file system image across servers in a cluster, allowing the
servers to simultaneously read and write to a single shared file system. A storage cluster
simplifies storage administration by limiting the installation and patching of applications to one
file system. Also, with a cluster-wide file system, a storage cluster eliminates the need for
redundant copies of application data and simplifies backup and disaster recovery. Red Hat
Cluster Suite provides storage clustering through Red Hat GFS.
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