SafeKit Smart Console: Your High Availability Cluster in Your Pocket

The SafeKit web console provides an intuitive interface to orchestrate high availability for your critical applications. In just a few steps, you can configure a SafeKit mirror cluster to ensure business continuity:

• Application Failover (Macros Tab): Define the specific application services to be automatically restarted in the event of a failure.
• Heartbeat network(s): Dedicated communication path(s) used by cluster nodes to continuously monitor each other's health and availability and synchronize failover decisions.
• Virtual IP Management: Set up the Virtual IP (VIP) for transparent client reconnection after a failover.
• Real-Time Replication: Select the critical directories for host-based, synchronous byte-level replication.
• Checkers: Monitor the application's health and trigger automatic recovery if a process failure is detected.

The SafeKit cluster includes a dedicated split-brain checker to resolve network isolation issues without the need for a third witness machine or an additional heartbeat network. Learn more about heartbeat, failover and quorum in a cluster.

The SafeKit management console offers a unified view of your high availability infrastructure. It allows administrators to monitor the operational state of the cluster and track data synchronization in real-time.

For a 2-node mirror cluster, the console clearly displays the roles of each server:

• PRIM (Primary): The active node currently running the application and managing the Virtual IP. It performs writes to the local storage and real-time replication to the secondary node.
• SECOND (Secondary): The standby node receiving synchronous byte-level updates. It is ready to take over instantly if the Primary fails.
• ALONE State: Visually alerts you when the cluster is running on a single node (e.g., during maintenance or after a failure), indicating that redundancy is temporarily lost.
• Resynchronization Progress: When a failed node recovers, its status turns orange during background data reintegration, ensuring no downtime during the "return to normal" phase.

Beyond simple status icons, the interface provides one-click failover orchestration (... menu), allowing you to manually reassign the primary role for planned maintenance while ensuring continuous availability for user activity.

The SafeKit farm cluster is designed for high availability and scalability of services. The configuration focuses on distributing incoming traffic across both nodes simultaneously:

• Load Balanced Services (Macros tab): Define the specific application services (e.g., Apache, IIS, Nginx) to be kept active on all nodes.
• Heartbeat network(s): Communication path(s) used to detect if a node has left the farm, triggering an immediate redistribution of the load.
• Virtual IP (Farm VIP): Unlike a mirror cluster, the Farm VIP is shared between nodes using kernel filtering algorithm to distribute network traffic.
• Load Balancing Rules: Define the traffic distribution policy based on the source IP address or port.
• Checkers: Monitor the application's health and trigger automatic restart if a process failure is detected.

Monitoring a farm cluster provides visibility into the Active-Active nature of the infrastructure, where all nodes contribute to the application's performance (showing 2 nodes in this example; scalable to additional nodes):

• UP State (50% on 2 nodes): In a healthy farm, both nodes are in the "UP" (50%) state, meaning they are both actively receiving and processing client requests via the shared Virtual IP.
• Automatic Re-balancing: If one node fails, the console visually shows the remaining node taking 100% of the traffic. There is no "failover" delay, as the surviving node is already active (aside from a detection time of a few seconds).
• Node Insertion: When a repaired node is restarted, it transitions from "STOP" to "UP" and automatically starts receiving its portion of the load without administrator intervention.
• No Data Sync: Note that in a farm cluster, there is no "Orange" resynchronization state, as nodes are expected to be stateless or share a backend database (which can be protected separately in a mirror cluster).

Beyond simple status icons, the interface provides one-click node management (... menu), allowing you to manually stop or start a node for planned maintenance while the shared Virtual IP automatically redistributes traffic without interrupting user activity.