Cisco Cisco Fabric Manager Release 5.0 White Paper

This chapter provides an overview of the Cisco Fabric Manager Server Federation features and includes 
the following sections: 

Concepts and Terminology, page 1-7

Server Federation is a distributed system that includes a collection of intercommunicated servers or 
computers, which is utilized as a single, unified computing resource. With Fabric Manager Server 
clustering, you can communicate with multiple servers together in order to provide high availability, 
scalability, and easy manageability of data and programs running within the cluster. The core of server 
cluster includes several functional units such as Fabric Manager Server, embedded web servers, database 
and Fabric Manager Client that accesses the servers. 

The Fabric Manager Server in the cluster uses the same database to store and retrieve data. The database 
is shared among different servers to share common information. A Fabric Manager Client or Fabric 
Manager Web client can open fabrics from the Fabric Manager Server using the mapping table. A fabric 
can be moved from one logical server to another. A logical server also can be moved from one physical 
machine to another machine. 

This section explains some key points about Federated Server architecture. There are four components 
in a federated environment: Fabric Manager Server, Fabric Manager Client, Fabric Manager Web Client 
and databases.