Just for information

in the past year, we've had ~4 customers who have required xCAT HA in their environments, and the systems were critical or big enough to account for that.

Below are the scenarios of what we have done

The first cluster was a storage cluster managed by xCAT, and they had 2 sites, where they needed some kind of failover if one site went down.

The 2nd/3rd clusters were HPC clusters where we used drbd, and they worked really well; in both cases we had SGE, and in that case we used SGE's built in master/shadow to do the failover of the resource manager

lastly, the current project I am working on, between the 2 xCAT HA nodes, we have a shared storage, so in this case we are using GFS2 with clvmd, which so far has worked really well; and from the resource manager side, we have LSF, and have controlled that through cman/pacemaker making sure that the LSF_WORKDIR is mounted prior to starting of the lsf daemons. I may be documenting this for the wiki, and for public, once the project has been finalised.

I hope that answers your questions, given our use cases of HA requirements

Note on the HA capabilities of redhat, there were changes of the preferred stack for this, so there are at least 3 diferences

* rhels <=6.3
* rhels 6.4
* rhels >= 6.5

rhels 6.3 is the one that is mainly documented in the xCAT wiki, and if you look through the DRBD/corosync documentation, you will see 2 appendices; A is for 6.4, and B is for 6.5 and above

Before 6.5 the HA software on redhat was technology review, and therefore they made some changed in between. I am hoping that it doesn't get changed after this.

regards,

Arif Ali
Senior HPC Technical Architect
OCF plc

Tel: +44 (0)114 257 2200
Mob: +44 (0)7970 148 122
Fax: +44 (0)114 257 0022
Web: www.ocf.co.uk <http://www.ocf.co.uk>
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On 05/06/14 14:50, Lissa Valletta wrote:

No we do not allow multiple active Management nodes.

Using servicenodes, we have the xcat daemon (xcatd) running on each service node. Your xcat commands will be run from the servicenodes. You run the commands from the management node and based on your configuration, they get sent by xcatd to the correct servicenode. The Management Node must be active, it has the xCAT database.

Whether you want a backup Management Node is based on your needs of your cluster. Can you tolerate some time where you cannot run xCAT? It all depends on how you are using xCAT. I am not sure how many xCAT users invest in a backup management node. I don't expect a MN to fail very often and if it does can you tolerate the recovery time. The important thing is to have the data backed up so when it fails you can get it up and running quickly.

Lissa K. Valletta
8-3/B10
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
(tie 293) 433-3102



Inactive hide details for Jaskaran Singh ---06/05/2014 08:45:22 AM---I did read through that and i see you can do HA node optioJaskaran Singh ---06/05/2014 08:45:22 AM---I did read through that and i see you can do HA node option. The document talks about for high avail

From: Jaskaran Singh <[email protected]>
To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]>,
Date: 06/05/2014 08:45 AM
Subject: Re: [xcat-user] Multiple management node

------------------------------------------------------------------------



I did read through that and i see you can do HA node option.
The document talks about for high availablity, that would mean that the second node would sit idle.

I am wondering if xcat allows multiple management nodes to be used who can submit commands to the nodes at the same time. I believe multiple management nodes will create race conditions if issuing commands on the nodes at the same time.

In the service node concept, do you put the scheduler on each service node for it to be able to submit jobs to the resources.

Does xcat recommend having more than 2 management nodes because i dont see it in any architecture diagram?
Thanks


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 9:30 PM, Guang Cheng Li <[email protected]_ <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    HI,

    The doc
    
_http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/xcat/index.php?title=Highly_Available_Management_Node_
 describes
    the different HA MN options for xCAT, you could take a look and if
    you have further question, please let me know.


    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Li,Guang Cheng (李光成)
    IBM China System Technology Laboratory
    Email: [email protected]_ <mailto:[email protected]>
    Address: Building 28, ZhongGuanCun Software Park,
             No.8, Dong Bei Wang West Road, Haidian District Beijing
    100193, PRC

    北京市海淀区东北旺西路8号中关村软件园28号楼
    邮编: 100193

    Inactive hide details for Jaskaran Singh ---2014/06/05
    04:22:10---I know xcat has the concept for HA of Management and
    service Jaskaran Singh ---2014/06/05 04:22:10---I know xcat has
    the concept for HA of Management and service nodes. Has anyone
    deployed multiple man

    From: Jaskaran Singh <[email protected]_
    <mailto:[email protected]>>
    To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]_
    <mailto:[email protected]>>,
    Date: 2014/06/05 04:22
    Subject: [xcat-user] Multiple management node
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------




    I know xcat has the concept for HA of Management and service nodes.
    Has anyone deployed multiple management nodes.
     I dont see any advantage in having multiple management nodes but
    i need to research if it is possible, is it recommended, is anyone
    deploying it.
    Thanks
    
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