Veritas Cluster Server

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Veritas Cluster Server (also known as VCS) is a High-availability cluster software, for Unix, Linux and Microsoft Windows computer systems, created by Veritas Software (now part of Symantec). It provides application cluster capabilities to systems running databases, file sharing on a network, electronic commerce websites or other applications. From its second version, it also has started supporting AIX operating system.

High availability clusters (HAC) improve availability of applications by failing them over or switching them over in a group of systems as opposed to High Performance Clusters which improve performance of applications by allowing them to run on multiple systems simultaneously.

Most Veritas Cluster Server implementations attempt to build availability into a cluster, eliminating single points of failure by making use of redundant components like multiple network cards, storage area networks in addition to the use of VCS.

Similar products include Linux-HA, HP ServiceGuard, Sun Cluster, Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) and IBM HACMP but VCS is the only product in the industry that provides both high availability and disaster recovery across all major operating systems while supporting 40+ major application / replication technologies out of the box.

VCS is mostly a user-level clustering software; most VCS processes are normal system processes on the systems it operates on, and have no special access to the Operating System or kernel functions in the host systems. However, the interconnect (heartbeat) technology used with VCS is a proprietary Layer 2 ethernet-based protocol that is run in the kernel space using kernel modules.^[1]

Veritas Cluster Server for Windows is no longer supplied as a standalone product. Instead it is sold bundled with Storage Foundation as Storage Foundation HA for Windows.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Veritas Cluster Server

[edit] References

Greg Pfister: In Search of Clusters, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-899709-8
Evan Marcus, Hal Stern: Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-35601-8