[CentOS] Replacement for Linux-HA (heartbeat) - RedHat cluster?

Matt Shields mattboston at gmail.com
Fri Nov 30 23:40:10 UTC 2007


On Nov 30, 2007 6:28 PM, Amos Shapira <amos.shapira at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/11/2007, Matt Shields <mattboston at gmail.com> wrote:
> > LVS is a group of tools that do a lot of different things, the two
> > that you are interested in are:
> >
> > - heartbeat - provides failover if you have two nodes (active/active
> > or active/passive)
> > - ipvsadm/ldirectord - provides load balancing (ie. http(s) load
> > balancer in front of multiple web servers)
> >
> > As stated in a previous post we have a number of these setup in our
> > network and we handle a lot of traffic.  Some we're using for http(s)
> > traffic, others smtp/pop/imap, others mysql (read only queries off
> > replicas).  There's no end to what what you could use heartbeat or
> > ipvsadm/ldirectord or both for.  Both packages can be installed from
> > dag's repo.
>
> Thanks.
>
> What platform are you using? Mine is CentOS 5 on x86_64. It runs as a
> Xen DomU but from what I read on the linux-ha users mailing list this
> shouldn't be the issue. The production system will run on the bare
> metal (not under Xen).
>
> My experience with LVS at a previous workplace (a very large ISP) was
> also excellent - they had a couple of LVS servers in front of hundreds
> of mini-clusters (each such cluster service its own web or other
> network application, sometimes sharing disks using DRBD).
>
> The difference, I suspect, is that I'm trying this now with version
> 2.1.2 on CentOS 5 and x86_64, as opposed to possibly older version of
> everything (RedHat version, LVS, hardware (i386)).
>
> Thanks for your input,

Take Xen out of the picture until you learn how heartbeat and
ipvsadm/ldirectord actually work.  You could be having network issues
because you are hosting it on a virtual server instead of on a real
server.  So it's kinda hard to troubleshoot if you don't even know if
your configs are broken.  Get two crappy boxes that you can load
everything up on, configure them with heartbeat, get that working
where it will failover an IP.  then add some other service like
ipvsadm/ldirectord, and take things one step at a time.  Don't try to
setup everything all at once, it makes it harder to try to debug
problems.

I'm using CentOS4 and RHEL4 using dag'd rpms on a few of the CentOS
and RHEL boxes and built from source on some of the other ones.  I
haven't had a chance to try out a CentOS 5 system yet.  But as to your
stability questions, we've been using LVS for about 3 or 4 years now
and never, ever had stability problems.


-- 
-matt



More information about the CentOS mailing list