Sander van Vugt
ISBN 978-1-4842-0080-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-0079-7
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-0079-7
Apress 2014
Pro Linux High Availability Clustering
Publisher: Heinz Weinheimer
Lead Editor: Louise Corrigan
Technical Reviewers: Menno van Saagsvelt, Lars Marowsky-Bre
Editorial Board: Steve Anglin, Mark Beckner, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Louise Corrigan, Jim DeWolf, Jonathan Gennick, Jonathan Hassell, Robert Hutchinson, Michelle Lowman, James Markham, Matthew Moodie, Jeff Olson, Jeffrey Pepper, Douglas Pundick, Ben Renow-Clarke, Dominic Shakeshaft, Gwenan Spearing, Matt Wade, Steve Weiss
Coordinating Editor: Christine Ricketts
Copy Editor: Michael G. Laraque
Compositor: SPi Global
Indexer: SPi Global
Artist: SPi Global
Cover Designer: Anna Ishchenko
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Introduction
This book is about high availability (HA) clustering on Linux, a subject that can be overwhelming to administrators who are new to the subject. Although much documentation is already available on the subject, I felt a need to write this book anyway. The most important reason is that I feel there is a lack of integral documentation that focuses on tasks that have to be accomplished by cluster administrators. With this book, I have tried to provide insight into accomplishing all of the tasks that a cluster administrator typically has to deal with.
This means that Im not only focusing on the clustering software itself but also on setting up the network for redundancy and configuring storage for use in a clustered environment. In an attempt to make this book as useful as possible, I have also included three chapters with use cases, at the end of this book.
When working with HA on Linux, administrators will encounter different challenges. One of these is that even if the core components Corosync and Pacemaker are used on nearly all recent Linux distributions, there are many subtle differences.
Instead of using the same solutions, the two most important enterprise Linux distributions that are offering commercially supported HA also want to guarantee a maximum of compatibility with their previous solutions, to make the transition for their customers as easy as possible, and that is revealed by slight differences. For example, Red Hat uses fencing and SUSE uses STONITH, and even if both do the same thing, they are doing it in a slightly different way. For a cluster administrator, it is important to be acutely aware of these differences, because they may cause many practical problems, most of which I have tried to describe in this book.
Menno van Saagsvelt works as a senior technical consultant for a company in the Netherlands, providing e-learning solutions for (big) companies (especially Moodle, on clustered LAMP-stacks).