HP LH4r HP IA-32 Server Long Distance Cluster Interconnect for Windows Phase 1

hp ia-32 server

april 2001

technical white

paper

HP IA-32 Server Long Distance Cluster Interconnect for Windows

Phase 1: up to 500m

executive summary

The goals for the Long Distance Cluster Interconnect project are to investigate, select and evaluate technologies that are appropriate

to extend distances for the Microsoft cluster interconnect within the Windows 2000 operating environment. Cluster interconnect in

this document applies to the dedicated private network in the Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) cluster also known as heartbeat link.

The project has been divided into three phases associated with the following ranges of distances between cluster nodes:

•

Phase One:

Up to 500m

•

Phase Two:

Up to 10Km

•

Phase Three:

Over 10Km

This white paper documents the first phase of the project.

Phases Two and Three of this project were tested in HP’s Lab and

documented in the ‘HP IA-32 Server Long Distance Cluster Interconnect for Windows, Phases 2 and 3: up to 10Km and over’ white

paper that can be found on HP’s IA-32 server Reference Material web site at:

.

overview

This paper documents the first phase of extending heartbeat link distances.

Stretching the dedicated private network is one

component to achieving resilience in the event of a disaster.

The other necessary component is stretching the storage component.

HP has accomplished this by multiplexing the IP traffic over the same long haul interconnect that the storage traffic uses.

For more

details on the specific storage configurations tested, reference the ‘manuals’ section of

.

One of the main requirements for all ranges of heartbeat link distances is to use fiber-optic cable as the data transportation media.

To analyze this and other requirements several existing communication technologies such as Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI),

Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) are discussed.

The following subsections describe and compare those currently existing communication technologies eligible to satisfy the goals of

the first phase of the Long Distance Cluster Interconnect project.

Others are discussed in the white paper covering Phases Two and

Three, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Dense Waveform Division Multiplexing (DWDM) that could be appropriate

to use for fiber optic communications with longer distances. Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) will also be considered as a technology to be

used to achieve the project goals.

Understanding the importance of having a highly reliable and available cluster interconnect is essential to the proper selection of a

communication technology that will serve as a long distance link.

Cluster Interconnect

Each cluster node periodically broadcasts network messages across the cluster interconnect to keep other nodes informed of its

health and configuration. The heartbeat signal is sent over a private network used for inter-node communications only. The cluster

interconnect is formed by installing network cards in each node and connecting them by an appropriate network cable. The link

must be configured using the TCP/IP protocol and must be isolated from the public network by a different IP subnet. A generic 2-

node cluster configuration is shown in Figure 1.

1