Creating network addresses

Network addresses assign a name to an IP address and port number on a node.

Network addresses assign a name to an IP address and port number on a node. You use these addresses when you define load balancing groups. A node can have multiple network addresses associated with it. For example, suppose a node has one IP address that is only accessible from outside of the local network, and another that is accessible only from inside the network. In this case, you can define one network address using the external IP address, and another using the internal address. You can then create two different load balancing policies, one for external clients, and another for internal clients.

Note

You must create network addresses for your nodes, even if you intend to base your connection load balance groups on fault groups or subclusters. Load balancing rules can only select nodes that have a network address defined for them.

You create a network address using the CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS statement. This statement takes:

The name to assign to the network address
The name of the node
The IP address of the node to associate with the network address
The port number the node uses to accept client connections (optional)

Note

You can use hostnames instead of IP addresses when creating network addresses. However, doing so may lead to confusion if you are not sure which IP address a hostname resolves to. Using hostnames can also cause problems if your DNS server maps the hostname to multiple IP addresses.

The following example demonstrates creating three network addresses, one for each node in a three-node database.

=> SELECT node_name,node_address,node_address_family FROM v_catalog.nodes;
    node_name     | node_address | node_address_family
------------------+--------------+----------------------
 v_vmart_node0001 | 10.20.110.21 | ipv4
 v_vmart_node0002 | 10.20.110.22 | ipv4
 v_vmart_node0003 | 10.20.110.23 | ipv4
(4 rows)


=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node01 ON v_vmart_node0001 WITH '10.20.110.21';
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS
=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node02 ON v_vmart_node0002 WITH '10.20.110.22';
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS
=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node03 on v_vmart_node0003 WITH '10.20.110.23';
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS

Creating network addresses for IPv6 addresses works the same way:

=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node1_ipv6 ON v_vmart_node0001 WITH '2001:0DB8:7D5F:7433::';
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS

Vertica does not perform any tests on the IP address you supply in the CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS statement. You must test the IP addresses you supply to this statement to confirm they correspond to the right node.

Vertica does not restrict the address you supply because it is often not aware of all the network addresses through which the node is accessible. For example, your node may be accessible from an external network via an IP address that Vertica is not configured to use. Or, your node can have both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address, only one of which Vertica is aware of.

For example, suppose v_vmart_node0003 from the previous example is not accessible via the IP address 192.168.1.5. You can still create a network address for it using that address:

=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node04 ON v_vmart_node0003 WITH '192.168.1.5';
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS

If you create a network group and routing rule that targets this address, client connections would either connect to the wrong node, or fail due to being connected to a host that's not part of a Vertica cluster.

Specifying a port number in a network address

By default, the CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS statement assumes the port number for the node's client connection is the default 5433. Sometimes, you may have a node listening for client connections on a different port. You can supply an alternate port number for the network address using the PORT keyword.

For example, suppose your nodes are behind a NAT router. In this case, you can have your nodes listen on different port numbers so the NAT router can route connections to them. When creating network addresses for these nodes, you supply the IP address of the NAT router and the port number the node is listening on. For example:

=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node1_nat ON v_vmart_node0001 WITH '192.168.10.10' PORT 5433;
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS
=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node2_nat ON v_vmart_node0002 with '192.168.10.10' PORT 5434;
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS
=> CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS node3_nat ON v_vmart_node0003 with '192.168.10.10' PORT 5435;
CREATE NETWORK ADDRESS