On Friday 30 November 2007, Amos Shapira wrote:
Hello,
I'm beginning to give up on making Linux-HA's heartbeat work for my environment (CentOS x86_64) and am wondering what other option have I got to help me:
- Use IPVS to maintain a cluster of virtual servers, either master/slave
or load-balanced. 2. Use DRBD in master/slave fashion to keep a home-grown application highly-available.
The first thing I stumbled upon is RedHat Cluster Suite ( http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/centos_linux_guides/centos_cluster_c onfiguration_and_management/), from which I also saw some packages on my CentOS servers.
I've never heard of it before and am just starting to dig its docs, but if someone here can confirm/deny that this is a possible route to take it might save me some time or doubts.
We are in the middle of migrating to a new colo and I first heard about Cluster Suite with the release of 5.
Our old colo used 2 different 2-node clusters using hearbeat version 1. We had a 2-node cluster in Active/passive for the LVS director and 4 nodes as real servers. Our other 2-node cluster was file servers.
I saw the Redhat Cluster Suite (RCS) and spent 2 weeks trying to implement it- without success. I ran into bugs and couldn't get it to work right.
(Parenthecally let me say this: VERSION 2 ROCKS! With version 1, you are limited to 2 nodes. With 2, as many as you want.)
So I went back to heartbeat and learned version 2. Now, we have a 6-node cluster where ANY NODE can be a REAL SERVER OR a LVS DIRECTOR. It was really cool when I learned how to do it. I spent 2 more weeks learning it BUT I have a solution that works and has been stable since inception. Note that we left the file servers in their own 2 node cluster.
So, in summary, from my experience:
1. forget RCS 2. use Heartbeat in version 2 mode to control both LVS and REAL Server functionality. 3. This will allow you to sleep at night.
Enjoy!
Dave