1.2.18. Farm

A “farm” refers to a group of interconnected servers that work together to provide High Availability. Each server within the farm is known as a node, and they collectively form a robust and fault-tolerant infrastructure. In a High Availability setup, the ON Core will communicate with all three nodes to apply the workload distribution and fault tolerance mechanism.

When a request or task is received, it is randomly distributed among the nodes in the farm using load balancing techniques. Load balancing ensures a workload distribution, preventing nodes from being overwhelmed while others remain underutilized. This improves the overall performance and resource utilization of the system.

To illustrate this concept, let’s consider a farm with three nodes. Each node is responsible for processing and handling incoming requests, ensuring the smooth operation of the system.

The nature of the farm enables fault tolerance. If one node fails or becomes unresponsive, it is removed from the list of available nodes and the workload will be redirected to another node until it recovers.

A node failure will also interrupt a VPN connection, forcing the host to reconnect to the VPN and utilize an available node to connect to the network. This failover mechanism ensures that the system continues to operate even in the presence of failures, providing High Availability to end-users.

To see the application of this concept, see the Configure > VPN > Manage VPN farms section in the Administration Portal.