Configuring a PowerConnect Cloud Cluster

Overview

The PowerConnect Cloud agent can be run in a cluster. Hazelcast is used as the clustering technology. The agents in a cluster communicate and share configuration and scheduling information through a distributed shared memory grid. If an agent in the cluster becomes unavailable due to a failure or planned downtime, other agents in the cluster can assume the workload and continue to collect and process existing events and metrics.

Clustering the PowerConnect Cloud agent allows for:

1. High availability - if one of the PowerConnect Cloud agents fails, the others in the cluster can continue to collect and process events and metrics

2. Scalability - the PowerConnect Cloud agents in the cluster can share the workload to allow for high volume event and metric collection

Requirements

• TCP port 5701 open between PowerConnect agent hosts

Configuration

To configure the PowerConnect Cloud agent as part of a cluster do the following:

• Install the PowerConnect Cloud Agent as per the installation instructions

• On each host where the PowerConnect Cloud agent is installed:

  • Set the environment variable POWERCONNECT_MEMBERS to a comma separated list of ip addresses where the PowerConnect Agents will/are running. For example if you have two PowerConnect Cloud agents running on hosts with ip addresses 192.168.1.20 and 192.168.1.21 you would set the POWERCONNECT_MEMBERS variable as follows:
    export POWERCONNECT_MEMBERS=192.168.1.20,192.168.1.21

    

  • Restart the PowerConnect Cloud Agent on each host:
    /opt/powerconnect/bin/powerconnect.sh restart

  • Login to the PowerConnect Cloud Agent web UI and you will see each member of the cluster in the Dashboard under the Cluster section e.g:
    

    

• The first PowerConnect Cloud Agent to start (i.e. the oldest) is the primary cluster member. All members will sync their configuration from this host.

• If the primary node goes down, another member in the cluster will take over the role