Setting up your cluster is not the only task you will have to do. If things are up and running, you might have to tweak them here and there.
Once a cluster has been up and running, you might figure out that your cluster is too small and is not able to handle the load generated by your client applications. In this case, it might be necessary to add hardware to the setup. The question is: how can this be done in the most intelligent way?
The best thing you can do is to create more partitions than needed straightaway. So, if you consider getting started with four nodes or so, you have to create 16 partitions straightaway and run four partitions per server. Extending your cluster will be pretty easy in this case using following:
Replicating all the productive nodes
Reconfiguring PL/Proxy to move the partitions
Dropping unnecessary partitions from the old nodes
To replicate those existing nodes, you can simply use the technologies...