Linux-HA? (Now with cluster questions!).

Naoki naoki at valuecommerce.com
Thu Feb 9 06:02:44 UTC 2006



On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 22:07 -0500, Tim Burke wrote:
> Naoki wrote:
> 
> >Hey all,
> >
> >Does Fedora plan on shipping Linux-HA ( heartbeat )?  Or is there a
> >replacement / similar package which is otherwise recommended ?
> >
> >  
> >
> Heartbeat isn't in extras.  Rather, there is the "Red Hat Cluster 
> Suite".  This provides more than just the simple capabilities of 
> heartbeat.  It includes the host membership, ability to designate 
> resources (ie applications start/stop as well as startup config like 
> mounts & IP addresses).  There's even a config GUI to setup and monitor.
> 
> Information can be found on it by going to the search field on 
> fedoraproject.org and entering gfs.  The cluster suite is a 
> sub-component of GFS.

Cheers.  GFS/Cluster Suite is a bit over the top for a simple case of
bringing up an IP and starting Apache, which is all I'm looking at
doing.  Seems like most other distros ship heartbeat for this type of
basic job.  Would anybody object to it being added to extras, does it
conflict at all?

While we're on the subject of clusters though (warning, maybe off topic
a bit) .. ;)

I'm a lot less interested in GFS as I am in seeing 2.6.16 kernel with
OCFS2.

>From fedoraproject.org :

Red Hat GFS is... 

      * The only native 64-bit cluster file system on Linux for
        enterprise workloads - support for x86, AMD64/EM64T, and
        Itanium 
        
      * The most scalable enterprise cluster file system on Linux -
        supported up to 256 nodes 
        
      * Tightly integrated with Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (no
        patching needed) 
        
      * The only open source (GPL) cluster file system for enterprise
        workloads 
        
      * POSIX-compliant, meaning applications don't have to be rewritten
        to use GFS 
        

I would argue the first, third, and fourth points are arguable at best
and really just marketing speak rather than providing any sort of
technical information.  

As for points two and five :

OCFS2 also handles 256 nodes, but it's only a software limit and not a
design limit.

Last but not least, POSIX compliance, very important! OCFS2 is posix
compliant as well.

While this is in no way intended to be flame bait, IMHO in some cases
GFS is not as good as OCFS2, and they are mainly comparable in features,
yet OCFS2 seems to me to have little traction here on fedora-devel so
I'm curious.


For more reading :
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/dist/documentation/ocfs2-whats-new.txt


I guess my overly long post boils down to two questions, do we as a
group like OCFS2?  And, do we have/want a simple solution for basic HA
(failovers etc) ?






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