Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09

Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across local, regional and vastly dispersed datacenters.

The Solaris Cluster framework extends the high availability features of Solaris. It includes Solaris Cluster, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, developer tools and support for commercial and open-source applications through Solaris Cluster agents. The integrated software provides high availability and disaster recovery for local, campus/metropolitan and worldwide clusters.

By tightly coupling Sun's servers, storage and networking solutions, Solaris Cluster maximizes the level of service availability and performance for a cluster system.

The servers (nodes) in a cluster communicate through private interconnects. These interconnects carry important cluster information (data as well as a cluster "heartbeat"). This heartbeat lets the servers in the cluster know the health of the other servers within the cluster, ensuring that each server is "alive". If one of the servers goes offline and ceases its heartbeat, the rest of the devices in the cluster isolate the server and "fail-over" any application or data from the failing node to another node. This failover process is done quickly and transparently to the users of the system. By exploiting the redundancy in the cluster, Solaris Cluster ensures the highest levels of availability.

A typical Solaris Cluster configuration has the following components:

Hardware Components

Servers with local storage (storage devices hosted by one node).
Shared storage (storage devices hosted by more than one node).
Cluster Interconnect for private communication among the cluster nodes.
Public Network Interfaces for connectivity to the outside world.
Administrative Workstation for managing the cluster.

Software Components

Solaris Operating System running on each cluster node.
Solaris Cluster software running on each cluster node.
Data Services: applications and their corresponding Solaris Cluster agents monitor the health of the application and manage their life-cycle (start, stop and failover) running on one or more cluster nodes.

SOLARIS CLUSTER 3.2 11/09

Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09 is the third update for this version and brings extended support for virtualization with more options for Solaris Container Cluster, failover Solaris Containers and LDoms, new file system and volume management choices, improved Scalable Services support and new replication solutions for Campus Cluster and Geo Cluster deployments.

Key Features and Benefits

The ability to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM 8 and Single Instance Oracle database in Solaris Container Cluster. With this new deployment option, these applications can be run in fully isolated virtual clusters based on Solaris Container virtual nodes. This feature enables consolidation of multiple databases and multiple applications on one physical cluster providing consolidated, high availability and fully isolated services at lower cost.

Support for Automated Storage Management (ASM) with Single Instance Oracle database for use in a failover configuration. Solaris Cluster provides HA to Oracle single instance databases with the Solaris Cluster HA agent for Oracle database. Now these deployments can leverage Oracle Automatic Storage Management for ease of use and performance both in a traditional Solaris environment as well as in a fully virtualized environment based on Solaris Container.

Support for Reliable Data Sockets (RDS) over Infiniband (IB) for Oracle RAC. This feature allows users to leverage the performance and scalability offered by RDS on IB for Oracle RAC in a Solaris Cluster environment.

Support for standalone QFS 4.6 and later in Solaris Containers. In addition to the option of using shared QFS as a clustered file system for Oracle RAC, customers can now use QFS as a failover file system within a failover Solaris Container. This provides compatible environments with different levels of HA in a consolidated environment.

Support of Solaris "Update-on-attach" for failover Solaris Containers. This allows users to minimize cluster and HA applications downtime during cluster node upgrade or installation of patches.

Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) 3 mediator support in Campus Cluster deployments. Supports 3-room configurations with Solaris Volume Manager. This configuration provides higher protection against disaster: It enables automatic recovery from potential split-brain situations through the use of a 3rd room configured with a SVM mediator. A 2-node campus cluster configuration can survive the complete failure of one of the nodes of the cluster or the failure of all communications between the cluster nodes without manual intervention thanks to this new option.

Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR) support in Campus Cluster deployments. This is in addition to Hitachi TrueCopy (being obsoleted for asynchronous use) giving customers more choices when deploying their DR implementations.

Support for 1TB disk as a quorum device CTION: Solaris Cluster supports new high capacity disk storage as full Solaris Cluster shared storage and to be used as a quorum device. This extends the choice of storage options supported in a Solaris Cluster environment.

Extended Scalable Services capabilities. These include outgoing connection support, IPsec support, managed failover of IPsec session and key information and SCTP support round-robin load-balancing.

Solaris Cluster Geo Edition offers: support for HUR, script-based plugin replication module and support for MySQL replication

Solaris Cluster HA Agent for LDoms guest domains. This new HA agent manages the start/stop and restart of LDom guest domains and the failover of LDom guest domains between cluster nodes. With this new agent LDoms are managed by Solaris Cluster as black boxes in the same way as the HA agent for Solaris Containers.

This release includes support for SWIFT Access and Gateway 6.3

Support and Licensing

Solaris Cluster can be downloaded at no cost but support is not available under this free program. Purchase of a support contract requires the purchase of a license and a certified installation. Solaris Cluster product licensing offers perpetual licenses based on a per server and per agent fee.

More Information

Sun Cluster 3.23 11/09 Release Notes

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