14 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
14 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: "docs"
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page_title: "Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation"
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sidebar_current: "docs-consul-enterprise-advanced-federation"
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description: |-
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Consul Enterprise enables you to federate Consul datacenters together on a pairwise basis, enabling partially-connected network topologies like hub-and-spoke.
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---
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# Consul Enterprise Advanced Federation
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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.
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[Consul Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/consul.html) offers a [network area mechanism](https://www.consul.io/docs/guides/areas.html) that allows you 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.
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