Nirvana Clusters: An Overview

Nirvana provides built-in support for clustering in the form of Nirvana Clusters and Nirvana Clusters with Sites.

Nirvana clusters provide support for business contigency and disaster recovery natively or in conjunction with existing BCP enterprise solutions.

From a client perspective a cluster offers resilience and high availability. Nirvana clients automatically move from realm to realm in a cluster as required or when specific realms within the cluster become unavailable to the client for any reason. The state of all client operations is maintained so a client moving will resume whatever operation they were previously carrying out.

Three Approaches to Clustering

As mentioned above, Nirvana provides built-in support for clustering in the form of Nirvana Clusters and Nirvana Clusters with Sites. Nirvana clients can also use the same clustering functionality to communicate with individual, non-clustered Nirvana Realms in Shared Storage server configurations:


Nirvana Clusters:

  • Active/Active
  • Transparent Client Failover
  • Transparent Realm Failover
  • Provides Load Balancing and Scalability

Nirvana Clusters are our recommended solution for high availability and redundancy. State is replicated across all active realms.

With 51% of realms required to form a functioning cluster, this is an ideal configuration for fully automatic failover across a minimum of three realms.


Nirvana Clusters with Sites:

  • Active/Active
  • Transparent Client Failover
  • Semi-Transparent Realm Failover
  • Provides Load Balancing and Scalability

Nirvana Clusters with Sites provide most of the benefits of Nirvana Clusters but with less hardware and occasional manual intervention.

This configuration is designed for an even number of realms across two Sites (such as Production and DR). Failover is automatic should the "Non-Prime" Site fail, and requires manual intervention only if the Prime Site fails.


Shared Storage Configurations:

  • Active/Passive
  • Transparent Client Failover
  • Manual Realm Failover
  • No Load Balancing Features

As an alternative to native Nirvana Clusters, Shared Storage configurations can be deployed to provide disaster recovery options.

This approach does not make use of Nirvana's built-in Cluster features, but instead allows storage to be shared between multiple realms - of which only one is active at any one time.

In general, we recommend the use of Nirvana Clusters or Nirvana Clusters with Sites. Learn more about the three approaches here:

Advanced Cluster Concepts and Administration

The following links provide access to more detailed cluster documentation, including configuration and administration via Enterprise Manager or Nirvana's Administration APIs:

Clustering Overview

Clustered Server Concepts

Cluster Administration

Programmatic Administration