Linux-HA [Was: High availability virtual ip]

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

2009/6/24 Michael Tewner <tewner at gmail.com>:

> I you would like to also manage cluster resources, Linux-HA is your best
> solution. I would agree that it has a steep learning curve, and it's a pain,
> but it does exactly what you want, and more. It will handle all of your
> cluster resources - We've used it for MySQL, DRBD, OCFS2, Asterisk, and
> others.

Since I was the one who mentioned Linux-HA/heartbeat in the first
place, I feel compelled to say that

0) I have no affiliation or vested interest in Linux-HA, and I am not
going to take the job of its public defender on.

1) I cannot comment on the problems that Itay et al. had since I don't
know what they were and don't understand some of the (incomplete) use
case descriptions. See item 0 above, thorough investigations can go to
the appropriate Linux-HA forums.

2) My experiences with Linux-HA were separated in time by a few years
and have always been in the context of HA of quite a bit more than
just IP address, including DRBD, etc., for management (i.e., no
serious high performance server traffic requirements, no "five nines"
or anything like that, only "we need HA of management systems"; DRBD
integration was a big draw.). It is certainly possible that if one
needs only a virtual IP there are other solutions. I mentioned it
because I knew that virtual IP was one of the things it did.

3) Allow me to take the claims of "too steep learning curve" with a
grain of salt. The last time I recall (a year, maybe less, ago) it
took a *competent* person a few hours from "never heard of Linux-HA"
to reading the docs, installing and configuring it, integrating it
with a very non-trivial server application, verifying in the lab,
demoing live that it works, and being very satisfied the experience.
This included IP address HA, uninterrupted client sessions through
failover, live replication of configuration changes, contiguous
real-time management of a complicated network infrastructure through
failover, etc.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | oleg at goldshmidt.org