cfengine Master Server Deployment Models

The cfengine master server can be a standalone HP-UX system servicing groups of distributed clients. The clients can themselves be standalone systems or members of a Serviceguard cluster. If you are already using a Systems Insight Manager central management server, this can be an ideal system to use as a cfengine master server. Master servers can also act as clients and the configuration synchronization tasks can be performed on these systems as well as the remote clients.

If you are managing Serviceguard clusters, cfengine can be deployed strictly for intra-cluster use to synchronize the members of a single cluster. In this configuration, cfservd is configured as a package for high availability but the only cfengine clients are the cluster members themselves. The package’s DNS name/IP address is the name for the cfengine master server.

In addition to providing configuration synchronization as an intra-cluster service, another Serviceguard configuration has the cluster providing the highly available configuration synchronization service to groups of remote client systems. Those clients can be standalone systems or Serviceguard clusters. The cluster providing the cfengine service can be a client of itself and also take advantage of cfengine’s configuration synchronization features. A possible but somewhat unusual configuration is to have a fixed member of a Serviceguard cluster act as the master server but no package is configured so cfservd will not be highly available. This configuration is valid but not recommended.