It's 2014 and I figured that maybe the state of the art in RAIS (true clustering of servers vs. disks) might have gotten somewhere since the last time I looked at the idea in about 2011.
I have two home servers (down from 3, the electric bills are punitive where I now live) with a dozen services running on them. The only true clustering technology I've gotten working so far is Galera+MySQL (and it actually requires a third "server", which I put on an Acer Revo sitting in a corner to protect against split-brain). The problem with other services is they either don't have clustering capability or are a true pain to set up for clustering. (Think postfix local delivery, think Jira, think MythTV's backend.) One of my coworkers suggested GlusterFS but that's a piecemeal approach which might cluster one or two of the apps, and he warns me that it'll fall apart in some scenarios. My goal is simple: mash the power button or yank the network cable from either of these machines, and have all the apps still running. Then plug the machine back in and have all state restored to full redundancy without having to type any commands. (Galera actually accomplishes this, it's a dream come true!) I'm posting this after a frustrating 24 hours with old technologies AoE (ATA over Ethernet) and OCFS2 (Oracle's clustered filesystem). They have the feel of something you'd download off ftp.uu.net sometime around 1997 and spend a week or three getting to work. OCFS2 is horrible; AoE comes up OK but by itself accomplishes nothing beyond a collection of universally accessible raw disk blocks. Turning those blocks into HA email on my screen or a monitoring system that doesn't go down is an exercise for the reader. Is HA a dead technology? I'm flummoxed that the state of the art still feels so 1990s. What am I missing? Did the commercial cloud services co-opt all development and horde this technology for their own overpriced business models? -rich _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
