IBM Aspera -HST Server Cluster
Deploying HST Server as a high-availability cluster enables us to improve the high-speed transfer capabilities of Aspera with continuous availability and automatic failover if one node goes down.
A cluster consists of nodes. A node is a machine on which IBM Aspera High-Speed Transfer Server and Redis are installed. A Redis node can be a primary or replica. This is done by configuring a Redis database cluster and using HAProxy to connect the HST Servers to the Redis database. The Redis and HAProxy applications are included in HST Server installation.
Cluster Architecture:
● Each node has HST Server, Redis, and HAProxy. HST Server uses the Redis database to manage security and transfers. In a cluster configuration, all HST Servers use the Redis database on the primary node, which is cloned to the replica nodes.
● HST Server uses Hiredis, a Redis client, to interact with the Redis database.
● To direct Hiredis requests from all the HST Servers to the primary Redis node, the cluster uses HAProxy, a TCP proxy, to identify which Redis nodes are running and which is the master.
● Redis Sentinel monitors the status of the Redis databases, communicates between Redis nodes, and automatically promotes a replica to primary if the primary is failing.
Server load balancing:
Load balancer acts as a reverse proxy and distributes network or application traffic across a number of servers that sit behind the load balancer.
Steps to implement server load balancing on F5 Load balancer :
1. Add nodes to the F5 Load balancer
2. Create a new server pool with nodes that we added in Step 1
3. Create a new virtual server with a server pool that was created in Step 2
4. Send connection to virtual server IP address and check the results
