Preventing Connection Timeouts between Clusters

If your cluster gateway connects to a remote cluster through a firewall, you might need to activate the cluster gateway's "keep-alive" feature to prevent the firewall from dropping the connection after a period of inactivity. When you enable the keep-alive feature, the cluster gateway publishes "keep alive events" to the remote cluster at a specified frequency. The keep-alive events prevent the connection from appearing idle to the firewall.

Important:
Do not set a keep-alive interval that is too short because doing so might create unnecessary traffic across the network. Set a value that is just adequate to prevent the connection from timing out.

If you set a value for the Keep Alive Interval on the local cluster, the gateway will send keep-alive messages to the remote cluster. To allow keep-alive messages to flow in both directions, you must set a value for the Keep Alive Interval on the remote cluster as well.

To implement the keep-alive feature, you must know what exactly causes the firewall to drop a connection. Ask the network administrators at each end of the cluster gateway to provide behavioral information about the firewalls. With this information, you can determine which cluster gateway must send keep-alive messages and at what frequency so that the connection is intact.

3. On the Configuration tab, examine the Keep Alive Interval field. It will display either the amount of time between keep-alive events, in seconds, or the word "Disabled" if the keep-alive feature is not activated.

a. Click the current Keep Alive Interval value to display the Change Cluster Gateway Keep Alive Interval page.

b. In the Keep Alive Interval (seconds) field, specify the frequency at which you want the cluster gateway to publish keep-alive messages. Specify zero seconds if you want to disable the keep-alive feature.