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## Requirements for Designing a Campus Cluster

When designing your campus cluster, all of the requirements for a standard cluster still apply. Plan your cluster to eliminate any single point of failure in nodes, cluster interconnect, data storage, and public network. Just as in the standard cluster, a campus cluster requires redundant connections and switches. Disk multipathing helps ensure that each node can access each shared storage device. These concerns are universal for Oracle Solaris Cluster.

After you have a valid cluster plan, follow the requirements in this section to ensure a correct campus cluster. To achieve maximum benefits from your campus cluster, consider implementing the Guidelines for Designing a Campus Cluster.

Note - This chapter describes ways to design your campus cluster using fully tested and supported hardware components and transport technologies. You can also design your campus cluster according to Oracle Solaris Cluster's specification, regardless of the components used.

To build a specifications-based campus cluster, contact your Oracle representative, who will assist you with the design and implementation of your specific configuration. This process ensures that the configuration that you implement complies with the specification guidelines, is interoperable, and is supportable.

### Selecting Networking Technologies

Your campus cluster must observe all requirements and limitations of the technologies that you choose to use. Determining Campus Cluster Connection Technologies provides a list of tested technologies and their known limitations.

When planning your cluster interconnect, remember that campus clustering requires redundant network connections.

### Connecting to Storage

A campus cluster must include at least two rooms using two independent SANs to connect to the shared storage. See Figure 7-1 for an illustration of this configuration.

If you are using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), all nodes that support Oracle RAC must be fully connected to the shared storage devices. Also, all rooms of a specifications-based campus cluster must be fully connected to the shared storage devices.

See Quorum in Clusters With Four Rooms or More for a description of a campus cluster with both direct and indirect storage connections.

### Sharing Data Storage

Your campus cluster must use SAN-supported storage devices for shared storage. When planning the cluster, ensure that it adheres to the SAN requirements for all storage connections. See the SAN Solutions documentation site for information about SAN requirements.

Oracle Solaris Cluster software supports two methods of data replication: host-based replication and storage-based replication. Host-based data replication can mirror a campus cluster's shared data. If one room of the cluster is lost, another room must be able to provide access to the data. Therefore, mirroring between shared disks must always be performed across rooms, rather than within rooms. Both copies of the data should never be located in a single room. Host-based data replication can be n inexpensive solution because it uses locally-attached disks and does not require special storage arrays.

An alternative to host-based replication is storage-based replication, which moves the work of data replication off the cluster nodes and onto the storage device. Storage-based data replication can simplify the infrastructure required, which can be useful in campus cluster configurations.

For more information on both types of data replication and supported software, see Chapter 4, Data Replication Approaches, in Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide.

### Complying With Quorum Device Requirements

You must use a quorum device for a two-node cluster. For larger clusters, a quorum device is optional. These are standard cluster requirements.

Note - In Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, a quorum device can be a storage device or a quorum server.

In addition, you can configure quorum devices to ensure that specific rooms can form a cluster in the event of a failure. For guidelines about where to locate your quorum device, see Deciding How to Use Quorum Devices.

### Replicating Solaris Volume Manager Disksets

If you use Solaris Volume Manager as your volume manager for shared device groups, carefully plan the distribution of your replicas. In two-room configurations, all disksets should be configured with an additional replica in the room that houses the cluster quorum device.

For example, in three-room two-node configurations, a single room houses both the quorum device and at least one extra disk that is configured in each of the disksets. Each diskset should have extra replicas in the third room.

Note - You can use a quorum disk for these replicas.

Refer to your Solaris Volume Manager documentation for details about configuring diskset replicas.

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