Scalable, highly available cluster membership architecture
First Claim
1. A system connecting multiple hosts in a network comprising:
- a) a first chain of links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to its adjoining neighbor host; and
b) a second chain of heartbeat links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to the host adjoining said adjoining neighbor host.
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Abstract
The invention comprises a software-based communications architecture and associated software methods for establishing and maintaining a common membership among a cluster of multiple, cooperating computers (called hosts). The invention incorporates the use of nearest neighbor and overlapping heartbeat connections between clustered computers that are logically organized in a linear or multi-dimensional array. This arrangement of heartbeat connections has two principal advantages. First it keeps the cluster membership highly available after host failures because hosts can quickly detect and recover from another host'"'"'s failure without partitioning the membership. Second, it enables the cluster membership to scale to large numbers (e.g., hundreds) of computers because the computational and message passing overhead per host to maintain the specified heartbeat connections is fixed and the underlying physical network is allowed to scale. This membership architecture is well suited to distributed applications (such as a partitioned database) in which changes to the workload are made and propagated cluster-wide by neighboring hosts for purposes of load-balancing.
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Citations
11 Claims
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1. A system connecting multiple hosts in a network comprising:
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a) a first chain of links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to its adjoining neighbor host; and
b) a second chain of heartbeat links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to the host adjoining said adjoining neighbor host. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4)
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5. A method for connecting multiple hosts in a networked cluster of computers comprising:
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a) establishing a first chain of links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat to its adjoining neighbor host; and
b) establishing a second chain of links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to the host adjoining said adjoining neighbor host. - View Dependent Claims (6, 7, 8, 9)
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10. A means for maintaining the coherency of connection of multiple hosts in a networked cluster of computers, while using a minimum of bandwidth, comprising:
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a) means for establishing a first chain of links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to its adjoining neighbor host; and
b) means for establishing a second chain of heartbeat links between said multiple hosts such that each host is connected by a heartbeat link to the host adjoining said adjoining neighbor host. - View Dependent Claims (11)
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Specification