HA applications

[Jeremy Hansen]

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Alan Robertson wrote:

> What applications are people currently using HA technology to support?

I'm currently working for a company that's producing a HA DB cluster
"package" or "appliance".  HA is a very important piece obviously.  The
pieces we're using at this time include GFS, VACM, and your heartbeat.

> What ones would you like to support?

The biggest issue I have is not that what I need isn't available, but more
that there is 15 different things available all of which have a piece of
the puzzle to putting to getting the "total enterprise solution", but with
this comes a lot of mess.

For example, we have hardware level integrity checks on a shared array
which is mainly handled by GFS/memexpd/stomithd, stomith is carried out
using vacm and emp, vacm also acts as our terminal console server.  But
then we need service level integrity checks and "other" hardware checks.  
This means we have Mon and heartbeat trying to work together to cover all
the bases.  A lot of different pieces and a lot of room for
failure.  People have suggested we look at FailSafe, but just from what I
know about FailSafe it seems far more complicated then it needs to
be.  Maybe I'm wrong, it's still on my list.  Kimberlite seems to
incorporate a lot of these functions, but Kimberlite currently has
limitation as far as fibre channel and node limitations as well as it not
really being a true CFS, we want to have the flexibility of being able to
keep nodes in a semi active active configuration.

So...right now we're looking at trying to eliminate some of the
pieces.  Looking at either a vacm module to take the place of Mon specific
to the service we're running, or looking at possible a service level
monitoring stomith module, although I'm not sure if that kind of stuff
belongs in GFS.

Thank for your input!

-jeremy

> 
> 	Thanks!
> 
> 	-- Alan Robertson
> 	   alanr@suse.com
> 
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