[TriLUG] Recommendations for Linux clustering products

[Adam]

It depends on what kind of clustering you are looking for. If you are looking for high availability with failover then Red Hat Cluster Suite (upstream calls it Linux Cluster) is a good fit. It is strictly a high availability product though, attempting to do any load balancing or high performance on it will end in tears. It requires some kind of fencing, preferably power fencing, to operate. You'll need like a network power switch or management cards like DRAC or iLo or something for a fence device. You can also use switch or fabric fencing like Brocade or SCSI reservations but that is more complex to implement imho. Other than that so long as you have a private interconnect for heartbeat and dont intend to use SELinux you're good. 

Oh, and you *need* multicast enabled the private cluster communication network. Cluster uses multicast for membership transitions. I know a lot of people are gun shy about multicast traffic and want it disabled. The historical problems people have had with multicast, however, are non applicable to cluster; cluster never took anyone's network down with multicast. As long as multicast is available for the network the nodes communicate over you're good. It isnt required on the forward facing service network. Also be weary of portfast and spanning trees on Cisco switches. Keep the heartbeat network simple and unfooledaroundwith.

Cluster is included in RHEL 5 Advanced Platform which I think runs like $2500 a box but dont quote me on that (really call Red Hat for a quote it could be way lower than that depending on support levels and other factors). If you already bought AP entitlements then you already have cluster. For RHEL 4 & 6 it is a seperate entitlement. I dont know how much it costs. Then of course there's CentOS if you are good going it alone. Red Hat's kbase and docs for cluster might be worth the price of admission; cluster can get tricky especially when GFS is brought into the mix but that's a whole nother can of worms.

Good luck!
A

Sent from my Samsung tablet

Dan Weber <dan.b.weber at gmail.com> wrote:

>I used to work for a company called Cluster Resources (Which is now called
>Adaptive Computing).  I also don't know the cost, but the there were several
>Dept of Energy sites that used Moab Cluster Suite & SLURM (Simple Linux
>Utility for Resource Management), which seemed to work extremely well for
>them.
>
>Dan Weber
>801.414.7438
>dan.b.weber at gmail.com
>
>
>On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Ron Kelley <rkelleyrtp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Greetings all,
>>
>> I am looking for recommendations on building a small linux 2-node cluster
>> that will provide HTTP, MySQL, and NFS services.  Once up and operational,
>> this cluster is expected to be 100% hands-off (as in - deployed in the field
>> at remote locations) so reliability is critical.  This node will consist of
>> two independent systems connected via back-to-back GigE network interfaces
>> for redundancy.
>>
>> I have used clustering tools in the past (haproxy, ucarp, etc) and have
>> dabbled around with Linux HA, but would like to get some suggestions on a
>> turn-key clustering product.  I was also looking over at RedHat's site
>> recently and read some information on their "Red Hat Cluster Suite" product
>> and was trying to find out exactly how much $$$ it costs to deploy.
>>
>> Other than Linux HA and Red Hat Cluster Suite, what other clustering
>> products exist for the Linux world?
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> -Ron
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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