When configuring a new cluster, there are several distinct steps that have to be completed. An overview of the general procedure is presented below. The main tasks are to create and configure the cluster nodes; to configure Heartbeat (required only for fail-over clusters and certain load-balancing solutions); and finally to create the policies, services on the cluster.

First the new cluster has to be created in MC. This can be either a cluster created from scratch, or (optionally) an existing host can be converted into a cluster. In both cases the initial cluster has only a single node, the additional nodes have to be added (and bootstrapped) manually. Bootstrapping a cluster node is very similar to bootstrapping a regular host. It is important to create properties for the parameters that are different on each node (for example, hostname, IP address, and so on) and use links during configuration when referring to these properties.

In case of fail-over and multicast load-balancing clusters, the Heartbeat component also has to be installed and configured. For load-balancing clusters where the load-balancing is performed by an external device (that is, a load balancer, DNS server, and so on), this external device also has to be configured. Configuring Heartbeat has two main steps, first the communication between the nodes has to be configured, then the Heartbeat resources that are taken over when a node fails have to be created (see Section 12.5, Heartbeat for details).

After completing the above procedure, the cluster-specific configuration of the system is finished — later steps can be performed identically to managing the policies of regular hosts.

The individual steps of the above procedure are described in the following sections in detail.