Motorola Series Switch WS5100 - Manual (Page 196)

5-26 WS5100 Series Switch System Reference Guide
running on WS1, by duplicating the commands and sending them to the group over the virtual connection. To
view status and membership information, refer to the following:
After sending the command to the other members, the cluster-management protocol (at WS1) waits for a
response from the members of the redundancy group. Upon receiving a response from each member, WS1
updates the user’s screen and allows the user to enter/execute the next command.
The wait time required to collect responses from other switches is predefined so if any one or more members
does not respond to a given command within the defined interval, the command originating switch displays
whatever responses have been collected and ignores the delayed responses. This time-based response
mechanism eliminates the possibility of indefinite response hangs and allows for quicker redundancy group
configuration.
There is no fixed master-slave relationship between members. Typically, a switch can be considered a master
for the command it originates. The members that respond to this command can be considered slaves with
respect to that command.
This virtual master-slave relationship makes this design unique when compared to existing centralized
management systems. Having a virtual master-slave relationship eliminates a single point of failure, since a
user can make use of any switch as the group centralized management entity (using the cluster-management