How to start with HA

[Justin Davies]

On 2001.02.15 10:00:00 +0000 Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> On 2001-02-15T09:21:00,
>    Pascal MiQUET <pascal.miquet@wanadoo.fr> said:
> 
> Has any of you considered to actually include some text in your mails?
> 

Lars, to answer your question, I'll put some text here :)

Pascal,

There are three types of clusters, I'll summarise them here and give you
some links to look at.  This list deals with one type of cluster, so asking
such a general question in here may not get you the results you want.

HA (High availability Cluster) - This is a cluster that allows a host (or
hosts) to become Highly Available, that means if one node goes down (or a
service on that node goes down) another node can pick up the service or
node and take over from the failed machine.
www.linux-ha.org

Computing Cluster - This is what a beuwolf cluster is.  It allows
distributed computing over off the shelf components.  In this case it is
usually cheap ia32 machines.
http://www.beowulf.org/  


Load balancing clusters - This is what the Linux Virtual Server project
does.  In this scenario you have one machine with load balances requests to
a certain server (apache for example) over a farm of servers.
www.linuxvirtualserver.org

All of these sites have howtos etc on them.  For a general overview on
clustering under Linux, look at the Clustering-HOWTO.

I hope this helps.

Justin