Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE 11 - HIGH AVAILABILITY, Руководство пользователя, Страница: 15 / 298

User-friendly Administration
For easy configuration and administration, the High Availability Extension ships
with both a graphical user interface (like YaST and the Linux HA Management
Client) and a powerful unified command line interface. Both approaches provide
a single point of administration for effectively monitoring and administrating your
cluster. Learn how to do so in the following chapters.
1.2 Product Benefits
The High Availability Extension allows you to configure up to 16 Linux servers into
a high-availability cluster (HA cluster), where resources can be dynamically switched
or moved to any server in the cluster. Resources can be configured to automatically
migrate in the event of a server failure, or they can be moved manually to troubleshoot
hardware or balance the workload.
The High Availability Extension provides high availability from commodity components.
Lower costs are obtained through the consolidation of applications and operations onto
a cluster. The High Availability Extension also allows you to centrally manage the
complete cluster and to adjust resources to meet changing workload requirements (thus,
manually “load balance” the cluster). Allowing clusters of more than two nodes also
provides savings by allowing several nodes to share a “hot spare”.
An equally important benefit is the potential reduction of unplanned service outages as
well as planned outages for software and hardware maintenance and upgrades.
Reasons that you would want to implement a cluster include:
• Increased availability
• Improved performance
• Low cost of operation
• Scalability
• Disaster recovery
• Data protection
• Server consolidation
Conceptual Overview 5