Mail server clustering questions

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Hi all,

I have a few things I’d like to confirm about Domino mail server clustering:

  1. Is it ok to have servers running different versions of Domino (i.e. 8.5.3 and 9.0.1) in a cluster?

  2. Can I have a cluster of two mail servers running Domino 8.5.x and another cluster of two servers running Domino 9.0.1?

If we assume Server1 and Server2 are members of the 8.5.x cluster and Server3 & 4 members of the 9.0.1 cluster, say Server1 will synch with Server3 using scheduled replication. Is the above configuration supported?

  1. Is there anything I should be aware when adding more than two servers in a Domino cluster?

thanks,

–J

2

Subject: Always think about load distribution and then failover load distribution

In Smart Clound Notes, they use a very simple 5 Member Cluster Scenario… Say you had 5,000 users you wanted to distribute in the 5 member Cluster… You would have 1000 users with Home Server distributed equally on the 5 servers… Then for each Home Server you would distribute the the 1000 users replicas across the other 4 Servers by putting 250 each on the other clustermates. So if server A goes down the load of server A is equally distributed across the other 4 servers.

Assuming QOS and/or Fault Recovery are configured properly this should suffice, but certainly welcome to have more than two replicas per user as well inside the cluster… In our development environments where we are running pre-production code I have each user with at least 3 replicas on each cluster…

3

Subject: Cluster Questions

  1. Is it ok to have servers running different versions of Domino (i.e. 8.5.3 and 9.0.1) in a cluster?

– Yes, you can successfully cluster a Domino 8.5.x server and a Domin 9.0.x server.

  1. Can I have a cluster of two mail servers running Domino 8.5.x and another cluster of two servers running Domino 9.0.1?

If we assume Server1 and Server2 are members of the 8.5.x cluster and Server3 & 4 members of the 9.0.1 cluster, say Server1 will synch with Server3 using scheduled replication. Is the above configuration supported?

– Servers can only be members of one cluster. If Server 1 and Server 2 are in cluster A, and server 3 and server 4 are members of cluster B, then the servers will use cluster replicaion within hecluster toremain updated, but you can still schedule replication between server 1 and server 3. But keep in mind, tat the synchronization will only occur when the scheduled replication occurs.

  1. Is there anything I should be aware when adding more than two servers in a Domino cluster?

– IBM recommends that you do not place more than 6 servers in one sigle cluster.