Hello HA list!

I have been 2 or 3 days at the IRC channel posing some questions and probably abusing your patience a little bit ;) which wasn't my intention at all. I got to the HA world about 6 days ago and I have been gobbling up documentation. First I would like to say that I find the documentation at the HA site dispersed and hard to follow. However the wiki web is easier to read and find what you are looking for.

Once said this, I would like to be able to understand heartbeat in a deep way and in future if possible collaborate with the documentation part or patching the software. I came across with HA because I'm working on a virtualization project. Basically what I have to do is set up 4 machines with XEN3.1 using exported block devices from a SAN using iSCSI. That's already done, but now I was asked to make the service High available. This is how I found heartbeat and started reading about this tested software with you many years of experience in the field and that so many people rely on.

What I want to do is to monitor domUs so that if they fail I can move them to other nodes of my 4 node cluster. In the IRC they have already explained me some of the issues I didn't understand before, like you can not monitor the whole dom0, you monitor resources (domUs). After doing that I would like to do a stacked cluster monitoring services that the domUs run, but this may take ages.

I have a 2 node cluster with a SAN for testing and having fun, so don't worry about warranties. Dominik Klein gently passed me his cib file for XEN, I understand almost the whole of it. The problem now is that I would like to add fencing to the cluster. Here comes the questions:

1.- Are fencing and STONITH different technologies that let you avoid brain-split? or they are just two different concepts achieved by the STONITH way? 2.- How does STONITH know how to differentiate between a communication network failure and a crash on the node? I mean if the node's network fails, how can the STONITH device kill it? 3.- As my SAN is not like a ServeRAID (it's not resource self fencing to say it somehow) I would like to run a different fencing script for every node of my cluster as every node have in a first time different block devices mounted (one for every virtual machine). I know how to block nodes accessing the SAN using its CLI, can it be done? could you pass me some example cib files?
4.- Would you mind listing some STONITH devices available in the market?

Finally I want to thank you all your time and effort. It's very likely you will receive more reply mails asking more of these questions, thanks in advanced.

Regards,

         Miguel Araujo


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