Cluster Partnerships

A partnership establishes heartbeat monitoring between two clusters that are running Geographic Edition software. Clusters in a partnership exchange heartbeats to monitor each other's presence and health. You can configure a partnership between only two clusters, and only one partnership can be defined between the clusters.

If the partnership uses either application-based replication, such as Oracle Data Guard, or no replication, a member of the partnership can be either a global cluster or a zone cluster. Such a partnership can consist of two clusters of the same type or consist of one global cluster and one zone cluster.

If the partnership uses storage-based replication, only global clusters can be members of the partnership.

The two clusters must have an Internet connection with each other. A partnership establishes heartbeats between the clusters.

The Geographic Edition software uses the IP interconnect between partner clusters for management as well as heartbeats. For additional security when a public network is in use, use IPsec to secure the IP interconnect.

The Geographic Edition software enables you to specify a command to execute when a heartbeat-loss notification is issued. This command is executed with root permissions. You can also specify a list of email addresses to notify when a heartbeat-loss notification has been issued.

The following figure illustrates a partnership between two clusters.

Figure 2-1 Partnerships Between Clusters

A single cluster can participate in more than one partnership with other clusters, but two clusters cannot be in more than one partnership with each other.