A question I often hear when customers want to set up a production PXC cluster is: “How many nodes should we use?”

Three nodes is the most common deployment, but when are more nodes needed? They also ask: “Do we always need to use an even number of nodes?”

This is what we’ll clarify in this post.

This is all about quorum

I explained in a previous post that a quorum vote is held each time one node becomes unreachable. With this vote, the remaining nodes will estimate whether it is safe to keep on serving queries. If quorum is not reached, all remaining nodes will set themselves in a state where they cannot process any query (even reads).

To get the right size for you cluster, the only question you should answer is: how many nodes can simultaneously fail while leaving the …