Migratory Virtual IP Addresses

Learn about clustered servers, virtual IP addresses, and virtual IP addresses before and after an active node fails.

Clustered server

Suppose the server hosting a critical, but not natively clustered, application goes down. The cluster server on its failover node notices the lack of a regular heartbeat from the failed server. This cluster server then decides that the original server has failed. It starts up the application on the secondary server, including mounting any required filesystems. It also takes over the virtual IP address assigned to the clustered network interface.

Virtual IP

Unfortunately, the term virtual IP is overloaded. Generally speaking, it means an IP address that is not strictly tied ...