Network Requirements

When planning your network, make sure that it

• operates at 1 Gbit/s or faster (for more details, see Using 1 GbE and 10 GbE Networks ),
• has non-blocking Ethernet switches.

You should use separate networks and Ethernet adapters for user and cluster traffic. This will prevent possible I/O performance degradation in your cluster by external traffic. Besides, if a cluster is accessible from public networks (e.g., from the Internet), it may become a target of Denial-of-Service attacks, and the entire cluster I/O subsystem may get stuck.

The figure below shows a sample network configuration for Parallels Cloud Storage.

In this network configuration:

• BackNet is a private network used solely for interconnection and intercommunication of servers in the cluster and is not available from the public network. All servers in the cluster are connected to this network via one of their network cards.
• FrontNet is a public network customers use to access their virtual machines and Containers in the Parallels Cloud Storage cluster.

Notes:

1. Network switches are a very common point of failure, so it is critically important to configure proper failure domains to improve data availability. For more information, see Configuring Failure Domains .

2. To learn more about Parallels Cloud Storage networks (in particular, how to bind chunk servers to specific IP addresses), see Securing Server Communication in Clusters .