[NBLUG/talk] Linux HA Cluster

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Sat Sep 3 23:20:10 PDT 2005


On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 12:33:33PM -0700, Mark Street wrote:
> I am looking at building my first Linux HA cluster, probably 3-5 nodes.
> 
> I have looked at The Linux Virtual Server Project and plan to spend quite a 
> bit of time there reading.
> 
> Does anyone have have any good resources or ideas?

Well, it depends a lot on what you need out of the cluster...

Basically, what kind of HA do you need?  Load Balanced or Failover?  (or a
mix?)

What "HA" technologies you need really depends on the type of application.
If you can get away with just doing load balancing, that's a lot easier than
if you need a failover (heartbeat( mechanism.  Though you could always use a
heartbeat to decide which server gets the IP that handles the load
balancing...

http://linux-ha.org/ is pretty much the way to go for a heartbeat...  And
they've got links on their site to other resources for HA...  Related to the
project you've looked at.

Red Hat's got some integrated clustering stuff (
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/csgfs/ ), possibly easier to set up than
a lot of other HA clusters, but requires shared raw block storage.  (say, a
fibre channel array; or preferably 2 independent fibre channel attached RAID
arrays)  Their docs had some good discussion about clustering -- at least
the version 3 docs did -- haven't really looked at the version 4 docs.  You
can get source RPMS for all their stuff from ftp.redhat.com.

If you've got an application in the mix that cannot be allowed to run on two
nodes at once, you might want to get a power bar that allows one node to
shut another node down.  http://linux-ha.org/STONITH
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit



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