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Network cabling guidelines

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Network cabling best practices separate traffic into the following networks: cluster, management, and data.

You should cable a cluster so that the cluster traffic is on a separate network from all other traffic. It is an optional, but recommended practice to have network management traffic separated from data and intracluster traffic. By maintaining separate networks, you can achieve better performance, ease of administration, and improved security and management access to the nodes.

The following diagram illustrates the network cabling of a four-node HA cluster that includes three separate networks:

Network cabling of four-node HA cluster

You should follow certain guidelines when cabling network connections:

  • Each node should be connected to three distinct networks.

    One network is for management, one is for data access, and one is for intracluster communication. The management and data networks can be logically separated.

  • You can have more than one data network connection to each node for improving the client (data) traffic flow.

  • A cluster can be created without data network connections, but it must include a cluster interconnect connection.

  • There should always be two or more cluster connections to each node.

For more information on network cabling, see the AFF and FAS System Documentation Center and the Hardware Universe.