Cisco Cisco Email Security Appliance C160 Mode D'Emploi

A. When a machine joins a cluster, all of that machine's clusterable settings 
will be inherited from the cluster level. Upon joining a cluster, all locally 
configured non-network settings will be lost, overwritten with the settings of 
the cluster and any associated groups. (This includes the user/password table; 
passwords and users are shared within a cluster).

Q. I have a clustered machine and I remove it (permanently) from the cluster. 
What happens to my settings?

A. When a machine is permanently removed from a cluster, its configuration 
hierarchy is “flattened” such that the machine will continue to work the same 
as it did when it was part of the cluster. All settings that the machine has been 
inheriting will be applied to the machine in the standalone setting.

For example, if there is only a cluster-mode Global Unsubscribe table, that 
Global Unsubscribe table data will be copied to the machine's local 
configuration when the machine is removed from the cluster.

Q. Are log files aggregated within centrally managed machines? 

A. No. Log files are still retained for each individual machines. IronPort’s 
Mail Flow Central software can be used to aggregate mail logs from multiple 
machines for the purposes of tracking and reporting. 

Q. How does User Access work?

A. The IronPort appliances share one database for the entire cluster. In 
particular, there is only 

admin

 account (and password) for the entire cluster.

Q. How should I cluster a data center?

A. Ideally, a data center would be a “group” within a cluster, not its own 
cluster. However, if the data centers do not share much between themselves, 
you may have better results with separate clusters for each data center.

Q. What happens if systems are offline and they reconnect?

A. Systems attempt to synchronize upon reconnecting to the cluster.