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Introduction
This chapter introduces the TruCluster Server product and some basic
cluster hardware configuration concepts.
Subsequent chapters describe how to set up and maintain TruCluster Server
hardware configurations. See the TruCluster Server Software Installation
manual for information about software installation; see the TruCluster
Server Cluster Administration manual for detailed information about setting
up member systems and highly available applications.
1.1 The TruCluster Server Product
TruCluster Server, the newest addition to the Compaq Tru64 UNIX
TruCluster Software products family, extends single-system management
capabilities to clusters. It provides a clusterwide namespace for files and
directories, including a single root file system that all cluster members
share. It also offers a cluster alias for the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) so
that a cluster appears as a single system to its network clients.
TruCluster Server preserves the availability and performance features found
in the earlier TruCluster products:
• Like the TruCluster Available Server Software and TruCluster
Production Server products, TruCluster Server lets you deploy highly
available applications that have no embedded knowledge that they are
executing in a cluster. They can access their disk data from any member
in the cluster.
• Like the TruCluster Production Server Software product, TruCluster
Server lets you run components of distributed applications in parallel,
providing high availability while taking advantage of cluster-specific
synchronization mechanisms and performance optimizations.
TruCluster Server augments the feature set of its predecessors by allowing
all cluster members access to all file systems and all storage in the cluster,
regardless of where they reside. From the viewpoint of clients, a TruCluster
Server cluster appears to be a single system; from the viewpoint of a system
administrator, a TruCluster Server cluster is managed as if it were a single
system. Because TruCluster Server has no built-in dependencies on the
architectures or protocols of its private cluster interconnect or shared storage
Introduction 1–1