[heartbeat] Are alternative interfaces supported?

[Keeper of the Keys]

I was wondering is it possible to leverage other interfaces like USB, serial etc for the corosync heartbeat in a proxmox cluster?
Like this you may be able to avoid having a switch which can also fail in your heartbeat path and just have a mesh (for small 3 node clusters you would only need 3 USB cables and 2 ports on each node, of course this solution does not scale well).

 

[dakralex]

Hi!

It is not possible to use any other interface than a network interface for Corosync as its built on top of KNET/UDPU/UDP, which are all network protocols. One possibility is to use USB NICs of course and use this as a separate/redundant NIC for the Corosync setup.

 

[Keeper of the Keys]

Thanks for the fast reply!
I really liked the idea of simple cables since that is the least possible things that can break but I guess it was not to be.

 

[dakralex]

The USB protocol isn't as simple as it seems from outside - but that applies for most protocols on hardware/signalling level

There's still the possibility to use a USB NIC, but AFAIK Ethernet is more reliable than USB in that regard and a redundant network over NICs should be done with separate switches anyway.