About Clustering
Clustering is a feature of the Sophos Email Appliance that allows two or more appliances to be joined in a group. Configuration data and other data is shared.
What Clustering Provides
- Centralized management of the systems in the cluster.
- The ability to use the interface of any appliance in a cluster to search and present a single view of the data collected by the clustered appliances.
- Sharing of configuration among the clustered appliances.
What Clustering Does Not Do
- Clustering does not provide high availability.
- Clustering does not provide load balancing. If you need to load balance your Email Appliances, you will need to use a hardware load balancing solution, or another suitable solution such as round-robin DNS.
When to Use Clustering
Clustering is useful in several scenarios:
- When you need improved performance and scalability that cannot be provided by a single appliance.
- When you have a multi-site installation, and need unified management and reporting.
- When you want redundancy and improved reliability.