[Linux-HA] Linux-HA on solaris

[David Lee]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Michael Schwartzkopff wrote:

> as far as I understood, Linux-HA / pacemaker should also compile on a non-
> Linux OS. Does it compile under OpenSolaris? Any experience? Is this code
> still working?

(Apologies for the delay...)

I think there might be bigger questions of principle to ask... see nearer 
the end.

Linux-HA (aka heartbeat):  With reasonably recent Solaris (I did the work 
over the years on 8, 9, 10, but have not tried OpenSolaris) and reasonably 
recent GNU-C and GNU-make etc. there is a good chance it should build and 
run.  Indeed, the intention was that the overall "heartbeat" project 
should, in theory, be portable to any UN*X-like OS.  (Note that we never 
got the Solaris build to the stage of being completely free from compiler 
warnings, and there were sometimes mysterious failures in BasicSanityCheck 
as it pushed at the boundaries.  But it worked OK with simple IP-address 
failover.)

pacemaker: No idea.  When the project split into the lower-level comms 
layer (based on the old heartbeat) and the upper-layer cluster software 
("pacemaker"), it was never clarified whether the intention was to keep 
pacemaker portable into the UN*X world beyond Linux.  My guess (but it is 
just a guess) is that pacemaker probably no longer builds on non-Linux 
machines.  Can anyone confirm/refute this?



If it can be generally agreed, in principle, that both "heartbeat" and 
"pacemaker" should continue to be portable, then I would be happy to 
continue to assist in that.  But I am no longer be in a position to lead.


A couple of other points:

1.  The pacemaker people seem to be preferring OpenAIS to heartbeat as 
their underlying comms layer, and I have no idea how portable OpenAIS is. 
So that might raise a question over the future of heartbeat, even within 
the Linux subset of UN*X.  Can anyone confirm/refute this?


2. OpenSolaris seems to have "Open High Availability Cluster" (OHAC) and 
"Solaris Cluster":
    http://opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/ohac/


I've no idea whether there is any compatibility overlap between pacemaker 
and OHAC.  I suspect, sadly, that there might not be (i.e. that the 
clustering world has split into two (or more) parts).

Hope that helps a little (even though it is not the simple, bright "yes" 
you might have wished!).

-- 

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