How many VAs should you have in your VA Cluster?

In a Virtual Appliance (VA) cluster, having at least two VAs is important for several reasons. Firstly, deploying a minimum of two VAs ensures redundancy, which enhances the reliability and fault tolerance of the system. If one VA fails or goes offline, the second VA can continue to handle requests and processes, thus maintaining operational continuity without significant downtime.

Additionally, having at least two VAs allows for load balancing between the appliances. This distribution of workload optimizes performance and ensures that no single VA becomes a bottleneck. Without this setup, performance could degrade under heavy load or during peak usage times.

In some implementations, especially in production environments, having three or more VAs can be beneficial for further resilience and scalability; however, the foundational requirement is to have at least two to create a functional and effective HA (high availability) setup.

Keeping this in mind, fewer than two VAs would not provide the necessary operational reliability and availability that organizations generally seek in an identity management solution.