On 7/5/07, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
How does clustering relate to virtual hosts under xen? Can you make a 2 host failover cluster as the xen dom0 and have it take care of the guests or would you build 2 independent xen hosts and configure guests as failover clusters? Or is there some other approach?
I have found the first approach is a nice solution to keep separation between HA infrastructure and the services proper. Guests are unaware of the particular failover mechanisms deployed on the hosts. You are not bound to keep the same distribution over HA infrastructure and services VMs, ie you deliver raw HA, your customers install whatever they like. When the HA infrastructure is invasive (as when you need to do online replication and are not able to deploy a clustered filesystem) and/or applications pervade system config files (think apps that tinker with passwd+shadow), this separation is a must. I would not break it by engaging the guests into HA business. Just my opinion --HTH