Clustering in Linux

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

I need to learn about clustering in linux. How to do it ? What (software / hardware)?? Any links to docs... ?

[Stuart Browne]

I'm picking a good start would be the "Linux High Availability" projects (http://www.linux-ha.org).

I've only used these functions briefly (back with RH 6.2, and the fun little Piranah packages), but they are very powerful, and can do some very nice things.

Start with the HOWTO's and information pages.

[Serviceguard for Linux]

Stuart's response is good for open source HA. There are also Linux HA solutions that are products. Check out this page: http://www.compaq.com/solutions/enterprise/highavailability/linux/index.html

The products listed here cost, but are based on commercial products that have been available on other UNIXs for years.

[Khairil Hamid]

HP has ported over the HP-UX HA solution known as Service Guard to Linux. This is a commercial product however. Check out this link
http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/highavailability/ar/mcserviceguard/infolibrary/index.html

[dirk dierickx · Accepted solution]

There are several solutions for clustering your application on linux, i will first present you with the commercial products available:

+ Veritas has a their cluster available for linux, which is pretty good and easy to use - http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDetail.jhtml?productId=clusterserver

+ HP has serviceguard available, which is a port from the HPUX version. i have never used it, but the people i know who have say it is more complicated then veritas - http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/highavailability/ar/mcserviceguard/infolibrary/product_brief.pdf

+ HP is also supporting a company called 'steeleye' which have been in the linux clustering market since 1999. from the demo i have seen it looks good and easy to admin. they claim to be the first to have a 'no single point of failure cluster' and support up to 32 nodes in cluster - http://www.linuxbusinessprotection.com/

now for the free ones;

+ a site full of information is HA linux - http://linux-ha.org/

+ depending on the application maybe you can use loadbalancing instead of a full scale cluster - http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

+ red hat includes a cluster called piranha, i have never played around with it though - http://www.advogato.org/proj/Piranha/

+ lastly, there is a distribution called 'mission critical linux' which aims to be packed with HA features - http://www.msclinux.com/

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,
Ref:

Commercial High-Availability Linux Software

The following companies provide (or are in the process of providing) commercial High-Availability software or capabilities for Linux:
High-Availability.com provides RSF-1 (Resilient Software Facility - 1). RSF-1 is available on every major Linux distribution, and provides agents for many popular software packages, and supports clusters of up to 64 nodes.
SteelEye's's LifeKeeper High-Availability product for Linux. LifeKeeper provides application recovery kits for Oracle, Informix, Apache and Sendmail.
Convolo: The commercial version of Mission Critical Linux's Kimberlite software.
North Fork Network's SANi.q. product combines with inexpensive hardware (IDE/SCSI disks, Ethernet networks) to create scalable, fault-tolerant, and easy-to-manage Storage Area Networks. An evaluation copy is available from their web site.
Clustra Database: Clustra's core product, the Clustra Database, is a zero-downtime, relational SQL database.
HP's MC/Service Guard for Linux.
Polyserve's's Understudy: a web, file, and email server clustering utility providing constant server availability. A 30-day evaluation copy can be gotten from their web site.
Net/Equater
TurboLinux High Availability Cluster. This is a commercial product which is similar in intent to the Linux Virtual Server project. In fact, it has used Wensong's kernel pieces in the past.
Wizard Watchdog Service Cluster Software
Resonate's Central Dispatch product, now being marketed by Penguin Computing (press release). It appears that Central Dispatch is also similar to the LVS project, including both load balancing and HA facilities.
Twincom's Network Disk Mirror a commercial product similar in function to the NBD+RAID1 open source solution, but already neatly packaged up for you. It seems like it would work well as a Linux-HA resource, or in combination with some other commercial package.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers has announced the availability of their RMS (Reliant Monitor Software) High-Availability software for Linux. RMS seems similar to a combination of the freely available heartbeat and Mon packages.
Mod_Redundancy is an Apache-Module that creates High Availability for this webserver throug a Master/Slave-Mechanism. As soon as the Slave notices that the Master is not available anymore, it takes over the IP-Address and the webservice automatically. It is commercial Software, but a free 30-day evaluation license is available directly from the website.
Mod_redundancy looks a lot like a subset of the freely available heartbeat package.
Legato now provides their Legato Cluster high-availability clustering products for Linux.
Integratus now provides their Universal High AvailabilityTM Extension for Linux. [press release].
IBM's WebSphere Performance Pack: rumored to be soon ported to Linux
Commercial Monitoring Software for Linux
Fidelia's NetVigil - a Linux based, massively scalable monitoring product.
Commercial High-Availablity Hardware
Linux NetworX makes hardware specifically for Linux clusters.
VMIC Reflective Memory
Reflective Memory is a high-speed, real-time, deterministic network. With Reflective memory, each node on the network has a local copy of shared data. The act of writing the reflective memory causes the local data on all the nodes to be updated.

BIGip: F5 network's turnkey load balancing/HA solution

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[Chakravarthi]

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/advserver/RHLAS-2.1-Manual/cluster-manager/