mirror of https://github.com/hashicorp/consul
27 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
27 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
|
---
|
||
|
|
layout: "docs"
|
||
|
|
page_title: "Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation"
|
||
|
|
sidebar_current: "docs-enterprise-advanced-federation"
|
||
|
|
description: |-
|
||
|
|
Consul Enterprise enables you to federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling partially-connected network topologies like hub-and-spoke.
|
||
|
|
---
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
# Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Consul's core federation capability uses the same gossip mechanism that is used
|
||
|
|
for a single datacenter. This requires that every server from every datacenter
|
||
|
|
be in a fully connected mesh with an open gossip port (8302/tcp and 8302/udp)
|
||
|
|
and an open server RPC port (8300/tcp). For organizations with large numbers of
|
||
|
|
datacenters, it becomes difficult to support a fully connected mesh. It is often
|
||
|
|
desirable to have topologies like hub-and-spoke with central management
|
||
|
|
datacenters and "spoke" datacenters that can't interact with each other.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
[Consul Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/consul.html) offers a [network
|
||
|
|
area mechanism](https://www.consul.io/docs/guides/areas.html) that allows operators to
|
||
|
|
federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling
|
||
|
|
partially-connected network topologies. Once a link is created, Consul agents
|
||
|
|
can make queries to the remote datacenter in service of both API and DNS
|
||
|
|
requests for remote resources (in spite of the partially-connected nature of the
|
||
|
|
topology as a whole). Consul datacenters can simultaneously participate in both
|
||
|
|
network areas and the existing WAN pool, which eases migration.
|