Thank you for this! 

One last thing I need to clear out before digging into your configuration specs 
etc.
Since the pacemaker is a fail-over system rather than a load-balancing system 
(like Red Hat) as you say, my understanding is that one of my nodes will have 
the VIP until:
1) Tomcat crashes and can not restart (dead for some reason) --> Pacemaker 
migrates VIP

2) The network communication with the outside network is cut off. --> Pacemaker 
migrates VIP

If these (2) are valid (are they?) then that means that there is no 
primary/backup concept using pacemaker (since I will assign to one of my nodes 
to have the VIP and my installed Load Balancer will distribute the load among 
my 2 Tomcats) and as a result there can not be a split-brain. 

Yet you imply that split-brain can occur even with Pacemaker if I don't have 
fencing properly set.
But how? Since it seems to me that Pacemaker does not have a notion of 
primary/backup. Or you mean something else with "fail-over" system?


Additionally you say that the "coordination" of Pacemaker instances is done via 
corosync which is over network messages right?
So what happens in the event of communication/network failure but only in the 
communication paths used for corosync coordination and not the communication 
path with the clients? Hope this question makes sense as I am new in your 
facilities.


Thank you for your help!



________________________________
 From: Digimer <[email protected]>
To: Hermes Flying <[email protected]>; General Linux-HA mailing list 
<[email protected]> 
Sent: Saturday, December 1, 2012 2:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Linux-HA] Some help on understanding how HA issues are addressed 
by pacemaker
 
On 11/30/2012 05:04 PM, Hermes Flying wrote:
> Hi,
> I am looking into using your facilities to have high availability on my 
> system. I am trying to figure out some things. I hope you guys could help me.
> I am interested in knowing how pacemaker migrates a VIP and how a splitbrain 
> situation is address by your facilities.
> To be specific: I am interested in the following setup:
> 
> 2 linux machines. Each machine runs a load balancer and a Tomcat instance.
> If I understand correctly pacemaker will be responsible to assign the main 
> VIP to one of the nodes.

Pacemaker can handle virtual IP addresses, but it's more of a fail-over
system, rather than a load-balancing, round-robin system. For load
balancing, look at Red Hat's "LVS".

> My questions are:
> 1)Will pacemaker monitor/restart the load balancers on each machine in case 
> of crash?

It can monitor/recover/relocate any service that uses init.d style
scripts. If a script/service responds properly to stop, status and
start, you're good to go.

> 2) How does pacemaker decide to migrate the VIP to the other node?

At the most simple; When the machine hosting the VIP fails, it will
relocate. You can control how, when and where the VIP fails back (look
at 'resource stickiness').

> 3) Do the pacemakers in each machine communicate? If yes how do you handle 
> network failure? Could I end up with split-brain?

Pacemaker uses corosync for cluster membership, quorum and fencing. A
properly configured fence device (aka "stonith"), will prevent a split
brain. If you disable or fail to properly setup fencing, split brains
are possible and even likely.

> 4) Generally how is split-brain addressed using pacemaker? 

Fencing to prevent it.

> 5) Could pacemaker monitor Tomcat?

If it supports stop, start and status, yes.

> As you can see I am interested in maintain quorum in a two-node 
> configuration. If you can help me with this info to find a proper direction 
> it would be much appreciated!

Quorum needs to be disabled in a two-node cluster. This is fine with
good fencing.

To learn more, please see the documentation available here:


http://clusterlabs.org/doc/
-- 
Digimer
Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.ca/w/
What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a person without
access to education?
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