About CloudControl Clusters

Clustering allows you to create a set of CloudControl appliances to run a single instance of the CloudControl. You can use clustering to implement high availability. CloudControl clusters are active/passive. The CloudControl product runs on the primary node, while the other node is a secondary.

CloudControl supports the following high availability modes. Choose the mode that more closely aligns with your operational needs.

  • Single-Site Configuration—With single-site configuration, both CloudControl nodes (primary and secondary) reside in the same subnet. After a failover, the secondary node becomes primary and takes over the CloudControl virtual management IP (VIP) and published IPs (PIPs) of the protected resources. These IP addresses do not change during a failover, and are accessible at the new primary node.
  • Multi-Site Configuration—With multi-site configuration, the CloudControl nodes reside in separate networks, for example, Site A and Site B. An IP address reachable when hosted on Site A’s network will generally not be reachable when hosted on Site B. For this reason, each CloudControl node has its own VIP and set of PIPs. They cannot be shared. In this configuration, we recommend to protect vCenter instances or ESXi hosts with fully-qualified domain names (FQDN) in DNS instead of using raw IP addresses.

The secondary node is kept in sync with the primary node automatically in real time. If the primary node fails, CloudControl automatically switches to run on the secondary node.

  • For a Virtual Appliance for OVA with single-site configuration, both the primary cluster node and the secondary node are created during OVA deployment. See Creating the Primary Node of a Cluster and Creating a Secondary Node for a Cluster. After CloudControl is installed, you can change the status of the nodes using the CLI.

  • For a Virtual Appliance for OVA with multi-site configuration, both the primary cluster node and the secondary node are created during OVA deployment. See Creating a Multi-Site Cluster.

  • For an AWS Cloud Appliance, CloudControl clusters are created after setup using the CLI.

For the ESXi hosts, you can use either individual PIPs, or a PIP range. If you choose to use multi-site configuration, you will need to run a CLI command to manually configure each PIP. See Configuring PIPs for a Multi-Site Cluster .