Hi list!
I haven't seen anyone talk about the energy-efficiency of high-availability
clusters, so I let me bring up my thoughts on it and see if we find this to be
a subject of interest.
Linux has decent power management via APM and ACPI. Therefore, each Heartbeat
node can be expected to manage its power usage efficiently, given the service
load the the administrator (including the CRM) has decided to run on the node.
What is lacking here is a power management scheme that looks at load on the
cluster overall, and, in the event of a power loss, consolidates resources onto
as few nodes as possible so that nodes can be throttled back or even
powered-down to conserve energy (in this case, generator fuel and battery life).
I happen to work from Houston, TX, where we just got hit with a fairly large
hurricane. Our labs were shut down before the event happened because we
expected a complete loss of mains power. I was playing with the idea of
leaving my team's services cluster running (it's running HB 2.1.4), but decided
against it because I know of no way to have the CRM consolidate services and
shut down un-used nodes.
Does anyone else think that this would be useful?
What I envision is a reduction in cluster size after having been in a
power-threatened state for a certain amount of time. This would be different
from fencing, in that the quorum size would change once the nodes to be shut
down have been verified as offline. This would allow the cluster to continue
operating with the redundancy and quorum logic as expected, but it would simply
be a smaller cluster.
When power is restored and after a certain amount of time (or perhaps batter
condition) has passed, the nodes which were brought down in order to conserve
power would be brought back online.
Yes/no/that's silly?
- Conor
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