Cluster config

[Sumant M Kumar]

Hi,

A) I need to configure cluster on RHEL5 over VMWARE.Can anyone help me on this.What licenses are required.Also let me know if any hobbyist/free liceses are available non-commercial purpose.

B)Can anyone tell me from where i can download linux OS DVD/ISO for Itanium hardware(RX6600,RP4400)


Regards,
Sumant

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

A) What type of cluster are we talking about?
A simple active/passive application failover cluster, or an active/active cluster, with possibly a cluster filesystem?

The fact that you mention hobbyist licenses suggests you may be familiar with OpenVMS. In that case, the cluster filesystem is closest approximation of what is understood as a cluster in the VMS world.

If you want RHEL, you'll have to pay.

The free equivalent is called "CentOS Linux": it is a free distribution that is compiled from the same source code as the equivalent version of RHEL. See:
http://www.centos.org

(Some RHEL-specific elements, like branding and artwork, have of course been changed for copyright reasons. Components related to RedHat Network are removed, as they are useless without a RHEL subscription.)

For RHEL, you'll need this license for each virtual machine that is supposed to be a part of your cluster:
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for VMware

Standard RHEL Advanced Platform licenses can work too, but VMware licenses are cheaper.

In RHEL 5, the Cluster Suite and GFS cluster filesystem licenses are included in the basic Advanced Platform license, so there is no need for separate licenses.

For active/active clusters, the application needs to be cluster aware too. For example, if a program has read some data a while ago, has not changed it, and still has the data in RAM, it cannot just blindly assume that the data in RAM is still up to date: the other cluster nodes may have made some changes!

B) From the same place you get your regular Linux distribution from, of course! That is, if your distribution supports Itanium at all.
(In other words, Please specify a distribution you'd like.)

For RHEL, if you have registered with RedHat Network, you can log on to https://rhn.redhat.com. Then click on "Channels", then "Download Software" and you should get a list of downloadable ISO images, including a DVD image for IA-64 (= Itanium) architecture.

MK

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

If you are using an rx6600, and Linux, Linux virtualization will not work. Xen does not support that CPU type.

To virtualize on an rx6600 you need to load HP-UX and a product called hpvm, then you can build a Linux virtualized systems.

The Linux ISO for this platform is available from Red Hat Network. It may be available for free from http://www.centos.org but I'm not sure how current they are for IA64.

There is absolutely no way you can run Red hat Linux on your rp4400. That is a PA-RISC system and it simply will not install.

SEP