How do you cluster Maverics server?

Hi Mate

Thats not an OS thing that would be upto the Application, it has to be able thread its processes.

There are suggestions around that combine target disk mode with software-based RAID-1 to "RAID" a pair of Mac Mini Server systems together (one running, and one basically used as a disk enclosure), but OS X itself does not include clustering software.

Xsan is the closest to clustering that's available with OS X, and that doesn't provide exactly what you're looking for. You'd also end up with a fibre channel storage area network and related hardware, which won't be cheap.

OpenVMS-style clustering can do what you want here, but that's a completely different operating system beast and an entirely different hardware environment.

Put another way, you're aimed above what OS X Server typically provides here. Linux can probably get you very close, and there are higher-end hardware (such as the FC SAN) hardware and software solutions (such as OpenVMS) available.

In terms of general Mac server 'clustering' Apple used to provide capabilities to do this but sadly killed off all their options in this area some time ago. 😟

In your case even if Apple still provided those capabilities they would not apply as any streaming application would need to have been written to provide its own clustering capabilities.

The nearest option you can get to realisitically with Mac servers is to use DNS load-balancing where a load-balancer will 'share' the load between two or more servers and also test a server is live before sending a request to it. The servers need to have some method of having the same data which might mean using a SAN to store the data and Macs can access a SAN as MrHoffman mentioned. However none of Apple's own server services would really benefit from this.

A hypothetical example that could be achieved would be to have two Mac servers running Apple Software Update Server, you would not and cannot point client Macs to both but you could point client Macs to a DNS load-balancer which would allocate requests to one of the Mac servers. In this case the two Mac SUS servers might indepenently download updates or you might use the same 'folder' on a SAN or you might run some other sync command between the two. In my own case I actually setup two SUS servers in VMware virtual machines using Linux and had them each store their own copies but sync their folders, I had one run at 12am and one at 12pm so updates got downloaded twice a day. The DNS load-balancer then forwarded requests to either of them. (I used Reposado to act as the SUS software.)