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Internet-Draft This document describes the Takeover Suggestion Flag for the ENRP_HANDLE_UPDATE message of the ENRP protocol.

Introduction Reliable Server Pooling as described in defines protocols for providing highly available services. The management component used for pool administration is denoted as ENRP Server or Pool Registrar (PR). Since a single ENRP server constitutes a single point of failure, there must be multiple ENRP servers. Servers, denoted as Pool Elements (PE), use an arbitrary ENRP server for registration into the pool. The chosen ENRP server becomes the Home ENRP Server, also denoted as Home PR (PR-H), of the PE. It is responsible for making the PE identity known to the other ENRP servers (by using ENRP_HANDLE_UPDATE messages) and also to monitor the PE health (by using keep-alive messages). As shown in , the following scenario leads to unbalanced ENRP server workload: consider a set of multiple ENRP servers with one subset being unreliable (for example, their network connection has problems) and some reliable ENRP servers. After a while, the reliable ENRP server will get the home ENRP server role for almost all of the PEs, which results in high workload for this ENRP server. Since the home ENRP server role is more computation-intensive (as shown by ), this leads to highly unbalanced workload for large RSerPool setups. This unbalanced workload remains, even when the unreliable ENRP servers become reliable again (for example, when the network problems have been solved).

Scope The Takeover Suggestion Flag defined in this draft defines a flag for the ENRP_HANDLE_UPDATE message. If the flag is set, the receiving ENRP server is suggested to take over the PE specified in the ENRP_HANDLE_UPDATE message.

Terminology The terms are commonly identified in related work and can be found in the RSerPool Overview document RFC 5351.

Conventions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Takeover Suggestion Flag

Definition In this subsection, only the differences to the ENRP_HANDLE_UPDATE message defined in are explained. The following figure shows the ENRP_HANDLE_UPDATE message: T flag: 1 bit (boolean) If set, the receiving ENRP server is suggested to take over the PE specified by the Pool Handle and Pool Element Parameters. It is RECOMMENDED for the receiving ENRP server to perform this takeover if it has the resources to do so.

Reference Implementation The RSerPool reference implementation RSPLIB can be found at . It supports the functionalities defined by , , , and as well as the options , and of course the option defined by this document. An introduction to this implementation is provided in .

Testbed Platform A large-scale and realistic Internet testbed platform with support for the multi-homing feature of the underlying SCTP protocol is NorNet. A description of NorNet is provided in , some further information can be found on the project website .

Security Considerations Security considerations for RSerPool systems are described by .

IANA Considerations This document does not require additional IANA actions beyond those already identified in the ENRP and ASAP protocol specifications.

References Normative References In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings. The Reliable Server Pooling effort (abbreviated "RSerPool") provides an application-independent set of services and protocols for building fault-tolerant and highly available client/server applications. This document provides an overview of the protocols and mechanisms in the Reliable Server Pooling suite. This memo provides information for the Internet community. Aggregate Server Access Protocol (ASAP; RFC 5352), in conjunction with the Endpoint Handlespace Redundancy Protocol (ENRP; RFC 5353), provides a high-availability data transfer mechanism over IP networks. ASAP uses a handle-based addressing model that isolates a logical communication endpoint from its IP address(es), thus effectively eliminating the binding between the communication endpoint and its physical IP address(es), which normally constitutes a single point of failure. In addition, ASAP defines each logical communication destination as a pool, providing full transparent support for server pooling and load sharing. It also allows dynamic system scalability -- members of a server pool can be added or removed at any time without interrupting the service. ASAP is designed to take full advantage of the network level redundancy provided by the Stream Transmission Control Protocol (SCTP; RFC 4960). Each transport protocol, other than SCTP, MUST have an accompanying transport mapping document. It should be noted that ASAP messages passed between Pool Elements (PEs) and ENRP servers MUST use the SCTP transport protocol. The high-availability server pooling is gained by combining two protocols, namely ASAP and ENRP, in which ASAP provides the user interface for Pool Handle to address translation, load sharing management, and fault management, while ENRP defines the high- availability Pool Handle translation service. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. The Endpoint Handlespace Redundancy Protocol (ENRP) is designed to work in conjunction with the Aggregate Server Access Protocol (ASAP) to accomplish the functionality of the Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) requirements and architecture. Within the operational scope of RSerPool, ENRP defines the procedures and message formats of a distributed, fault-tolerant registry service for storing, bookkeeping, retrieving, and distributing pool operation and membership information. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This document details the parameters of the Aggregate Server Access Protocol (ASAP) and Endpoint Handlespace Redundancy Protocol (ENRP) defined within the Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) architecture. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) is an architecture and set of protocols for the management and access to server pools supporting highly reliable applications and for client access mechanisms to a server pool. This document describes security threats to the RSerPool architecture and presents requirements for security to thwart these threats. This memo provides information for the Internet community. This document describes server pool policies for Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) including considerations for implementing them at Endpoint Handlespace Redundancy Protocol (ENRP) servers and pool users. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. SimulaMet This document describes the Handle Resolution option for the ASAP protocol. SimulaMet Hainan University This document contains the definition of a delay measurement infrastructure and a delay-sensitive Least-Used policy for Reliable Server Pooling. Informative References