10.0 Configuring a Cluster

This chapter contains the following sections:

The Advanced Authentication Server that is deployed first gets the Global Master and Server Registrar roles.

In a production environment, you must use more than one Advanced Authentication Server for fault tolerance, load balancing, and redundancy. To configure an Advanced Authentication Cluster, switch to the Cluster section in the Advanced Authentication Administrative Portal.

On the Advanced Authentication Server Registrar, a message Replication not configured is displayed along with the following text:

Click the button below to start new cluster. This server will then become the Global Master. It will register new servers.

  • The cluster consists of Sites.

  • Every site has DB Master, DB Server and Web Servers, located in same data center. The site is "web farm" or "server pool" in terms of load balancing.

  • Global Master is first Master of first Site. There is one Global Master in the cluster. It manages all the sites.

To configure the Global Master, perform the following steps:

  1. Click Set up Global Master.

  2. Specify the Global site name in Enter name of the site. Renaming not supported. The Global site name must be in lower case and can contain latin characters, digits, and underscores. Click OK.

  3. A message This server block is displayed that contains the following information:

Mode:

Global Master, <site name>

Replication:

replicating

 

Configured and running.

DB in use:

127.0.0.1

 

Master connects to local DB always. DB Servers and Web Servers connect to Master DB. They connect to DB Server when Master is not accessible

DB available:

<Registrar_host_name> (Global Master)

Below the block, a table DB servers table is displayed with only one server (Global Master). For each server in the list, the following information is displayed:

  • Site name

  • Mode (Global Master, DB Master, DB Server-1, DB Server-2)

  • Host name

  • Description. Click edit icon to add or edit the description.

  • Heartbeat. Each server is pinged for every 5 minutes. The time of the last ping is displayed.

IMPORTANT:Ensure to take regular snapshots or to clone the primary Site to protect from any hardware issues or any other accidental failures. It is recommended to do it each time after you change the configuration of repositories, methods, chains, events and policies or add/remove servers in the cluster.

You can convert DB Slave of primary site to Global master. This requires corresponding DNS changes. Nothing can be done if Global Master and all slaves are lost.

To view the list of all the servers including Global Master, DB servers and Web Servers, click All servers. For each server in the list, the following information is displayed:

  • Mode (Global Master, DB Server, Web Server)

  • Host name

  • Comments. Click edit icon to add or edit the comment.

If your company is geographically distributed and you want to deploy the Advanced Authentication Servers to every site, click Registering a New Site.

If you want to register a new server in one of the existing sites, click Registering a New Server.

If you have already configured a cluster and you are receive a replication conflict, click Resolving Conflicts.