Clustering question

Hi, i was wondering if someone can explain to me what is clustering and what it is used for in networks and with asa's.
I could be wrong but is it another form of failover or am i just completely wrong on that?

Thanks

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Comments

jdancer

It's just another form of fail-over, with active-passive being the common setup.

OctalDump

Clustering can be used for failover, but also for load balancing and increased performance. ie performance and availability.

Think of why a supermarket might have multiple cashiers working. It makes it faster, but also means that any one cashier can go on a break, or if one cashier line is very slow because there's an 80 year old woman trying to pay with personal cheque, it only affects that one cashier. This also has the result of making the total throughput more predictable, because if one line is slow it gets averaged out by the other lines. So, you have a relatively steady stream going in and out. Also, once you have this set up, you might be able elastically scale by adding and removing cashiers as needed.

Generally, you will tune the cluster for either increased availability (failover) or increased performance, depending on your needs.