Re: heartbeat

"Ed Sanborn" <Ed.Sanborn@xxxxxxxxxxx> · Mon, 1 Feb 2010 13:37:45 -0600

I am intrigued by this thread.  I am using RH Advanced
Platform version 5.2.  I have an 8-node cluster

running on an IBM Bladecenter.  For those that may not be
familiar with the IBM Bladecenter the blades have 2 NICs

on them and the Bladecenter chassis has a Nortel switch that the
NIC’s connect to.  I am using both NIC’s plugged 

into two segments of my LAN.  One of them is being used for
the multicast heartbeat traffic.  It works BUT occasionally

my network has serious disruptions due to this being a telecommunications
company and the engineers are

always doing something to loop the network and/or saturate the
network with broadcasts taking down the

subnet that my heartbeat traffic is on.  Sometimes when
this happens the network is so bad

that the multicast traffic is affected and I lose quorum on the
cluster.  Once I fix the network problem I need

to restart each node to get the cluster back up and
running.  Not good and not the correct design.

I would love to NOT use a public NIC for the multicast/heartbeat
traffic.  I tried to setup virtual interfaces and

VLAN those in the Nortel switch and moving the
multicast/heartbeat traffic over to them, leaving the 2 NICS on the original
LAN segments they were on but even with IBM assistance we were
unsuccessful.  Does anyone have any experience

with this?  I want to do this to truly isolate the heartbeat
network to eliminate any possibility for network congestion

taking down the cluster and also because I do not want the
multicast traffic pumped all over the LAN.

Thanks,

Ed

(978) 210-9855

From:
linux-cluster-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-cluster-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Kumar, Ashish

Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 12:53 PM

To: Fagnon Raymond; linux clustering

Subject: Re:  heartbeat

I
don’t  have any nics that I can dedicate for a cross over cable for
heartbeat so I was thinking I could use the serial or the network itself. Is it
possible to just use the primary interface for heartbeat since it is my
understanding it is nothing more than a ping. 

You don't need to dedicate a NIC for heartbeat with Red Hat Cluster. 
Unlike Linux-HA, RHCS makes use of multicast to communicate with other
nodes.  The multicast IP address is assigned by RHCS automatically, so you
don't need to do any special configuration.

Please have a look at this: http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Cluster_Administration/s1-multicast-considerations-CA.html

For setup instructions, check this: http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Cluster_Administration/s1-general-prop-conga-CA.html
- Section 3 deals with Multicast address settings

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