Introducing Clustering
The ability to cluster two or more Email Appliances provides a significant advance in reliability and flexibility. Clustering replaces and improves upon the failover capability of previous releases. After your appliances are upgraded to this release, any existing failover groups will be automatically and seamlessly upgraded to Email Appliance clusters.
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Multiple Appliance Clusters: More than a replacement for failover capability, the new clustering feature of the Email Appliance allows multiple appliances to be joined together. Existing failover groups is upgraded to an active-active cluster when this release is installed:
- Failover groups that currently have active-passive failover are upgraded to active/active clustering.
- Active-active clustering help ensure that email continues to be processed, even if one appliance in a cluster fails.
- After the upgrade, it is possible to manage all of the appliances in the group through a single interface, which can be accessed on any of the systems in the cluster.
- After a failover group has been upgraded to a cluster, other appliances can be joined to the cluster. Additional cluster configuration options are available.
Note: It is important to plan carefully when a cluster is created initially. When an appliance joins an existing cluster, it acquires the configuration of the cluster, and any custom configurations on the newly-added appliance is lost. After a failover group is updated to an active/active cluster, both appliances in the cluster are capable of receiving email. (For more information on this new feature, see the 3.0.4.0 Release Notes.)
- Improved Availability: Even if one appliance is unavailable, the others will
continue to provide service availability, including mail handling, reports and log
searches, the End User Web Quarantine and email quarantine summaries.
- Centralized Management: Configuration changes made on one appliance are
propagated to the other appliances in the cluster. Software updates can easily be managed
for all of the appliances in a cluster.
- Updated Dashboard: The new Dashboard provides an efficient
and comprehensive summary of the entire cluster, and makes it simple to check the status
of any individual appliance in the cluster.
- Visual Notifications: The appliances' visual notifications allow administrator to
quickly identify, locate and investigate issues.
- Enhanced Certificate Management: Per-appliance certificates are easily managed
from a single interface for each appliance in the cluster.
- Enhanced Backups: The appliances now have the ability to back up both data and
the email quarantine.
New Appliance Models
To complement the new capabilities of this release, two new appliance models have been added:
- The ES5000 replaces the ES4000 with updated hardware and improved performance.
- The ES8000 provides a platform with higher throughput for larger volumes of email.