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SmartConnect is a module that specifies how the DNS server on a PowerScale cluster handles connection requests from clients.
A SmartConnect DNS zone, which is a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), is an integral component when integrated with the Cloudera Private Cloud Data Platform. This is because it acts as a DNS delegation server to return IP addresses for SmartConnect zones, generally for load-balancing connections to the cluster and dynamic failover for high-availability when an interface or node is unavailable.
The IP traffic involved is a four-way transaction shown in the following figure:
In the preceding figure, the arrows indicate the following steps:
1. Black arrow (step 1): A service makes a DNS request for sc-zone.domain.com by sending a DNS request packet to the site DNS server.
2. Purple arrow (step 2): The site DNS server has a delegation record for sczone.domain.com and sends a DNS request to the defined nameserver address in the delegation record, the SmartConnect service (SmartConnect Service IP Address).
3. Dark blue arrow (step 3): The cluster node hosting the SmartConnect Service IP (SSIP) for this zone receives the request and calculates the IP address to assign, based on the configured connection policy for the pool in question (such as round-robin) and sends a DNS response packet to the site DNS server.
4. Light blue arrow (step 4): The site DNS server sends the response back to the service.