Creating a Cluster

The Virtual Traffic Manager is often deployed as clusters of two or more instances for fault tolerance (see Traffic IP Groups and Fault Tolerance) and management reasons. All of the Virtual Traffic Managers in a cluster share the same service configuration and are managed as a single entity.

You can join Virtual Traffic Manager systems together to form a cluster using one of the following methods:

In a cluster, all Virtual Traffic Managers are considered equal. You can access the Admin UI on any of your Virtual Traffic Managers, and the configuration changes you make are automatically replicated across the cluster. All of the Virtual Traffic Managers function together to provide fault tolerance and simplified management.

Log in to the Admin UI on one of your Virtual Traffic Managers and select Join a cluster from the "Wizards:" drop down box in the tool bar.

The Cluster Joining wizard starts in a separate pop up window.

To instruct the Virtual Traffic Manager to automatically scan the network for contactable Virtual Traffic Managers, click "select existing cluster". Alternatively, to enter a specific hostname and port you want to join, click "Manually specify host/port". Click Next to continue.

The next step reflects the choice you made in Step 1. If you clicked "select existing cluster", the Virtual Traffic Manager presents a list of discovered Virtual Traffic Manager instances and clusters.

If you clicked "Manually specify host/port", enter your hostname and port number in the boxes provided.

Click Next to continue.

To connect to the specified instance or cluster, you must verify the identity of the Virtual Traffic Managers within the cluster, and provide the administration credentials used by the cluster.

Ivanti recommends that you verify the identity of each Virtual Traffic Manager in the cluster you want to join. To verify a Virtual Traffic Manager's identity, check the displayed SHA-1 fingerprint against the fingerprint shown in the target Virtual Traffic Manager's Admin UI, in System > Security.

Tick the checkbox next to each Virtual Traffic Manager hostname to confirm you trust it's identity, and then enter the cluster admin username and password. Click Next to continue.

Check your settings and click Finish to join the cluster. The Virtual Traffic Manager software reconfigures itself and presents a new home page showing all connected Virtual Traffic Manager instances in the Virtual Traffic Managers list.

To add further Virtual Traffic Managers to the cluster, run the “Join a cluster” wizard on the Admin UI of each Virtual Traffic Manager you want to add.

If you want to join a Virtual Traffic Manager to an existing cluster, but the cluster does not appear in the list in the wizard, check your network configuration and cabling and ensure that the network permits multicast and broadcast packets.

If the cluster already has one or more Traffic IP groups configured, the wizard can add the new Virtual Traffic Manager to these Traffic IP groups so that it starts handling traffic immediately.

However, this is likely to result in a number of connections being dropped at the instant the new Virtual Traffic Manager is added to the Traffic IP group, because allocations of traffic need to be transferred to the new Virtual Traffic Manager. In this case, you can select to add the new Virtual Traffic Manager as a "passive" member of the Traffic IP group. It does not accept any traffic until another member of the group fails.