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Standard Deployment

We recommend the following default deployment as a starting point:

  • An external load balancer (optional)

  • Three cluster nodes

Reference Architecture

This deployment provides

  • Load Balancing - Where user requests are distributed across nodes for performance and availability.

  • High availability - The ability for one node to go offline without significantly impacting users.

  • Scalability - Where additional capacity may be added as needed.

Requirements - What you provide

Additional information

Load balancer

An external load balancer is optional but recommended. The specifics on which load balancer to use and the exact configuration are beyond the scope of this documentation.

The load balancer should be configured:

  • to direct traffic to all available nodes

  • with the cluster certificate

  • to use /ping as a health endpoint for each node in your cluster

The load balancer does not need to be configured for session affinity or stickiness. Session affinity is automatically handled inside the cluster.

Requests to any node in the cluster are automatically load balanced by the system to nodes across the cluster. This provides a basic level of load balancing regardless of the presence of an external load balancer. An alternative is to use DNS round robin load balancing, in which the cluster DNS hostname resolves to each node in the cluster.

Cluster DNS name

You provide a DNS hostname which is used to access the cluster. This DNS hostname is configured on the cluster as part of the setup process.

  • The cluster DNS name should resolve to the address of your external load balancer.

  • If not using an external load balancer, the cluster DNS name should resolve to the IP addresses of each node in the cluster.

Cluster certificate

You provide a certificate key pair to use to secure all communication to the cluster. A self-signed certificate is generated which you can use to access the cluster initially, but for production deployment, we recommend that you provide your own cluster certificate.

  • The cluster certificate key pair you provide must be in the PEM format.

  • The certificate should contain the hostname of your load balancer, both as the common name and as a DNS Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entry.

  • If you are not using an external load balancer, the certificate should contain a DNS SAN entry for each node in the cluster.

  • If accessed directly, the certificate is served up by each node in the cluster. If not already present, an additional DNS SAN entry for each node should be added if direct node access is desired.

Information to gather

While provisioning servers, gather the following information for use in the installation process:

  • Static IP address and fully qualified domain name of each node

If using the Appliance, you will also need the following network related information:

  • If you chose to use a static IP address during installation, will you need the network mask.
  • Default gateway
  • DNS servers