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Compaq sells Linux Clusters
sumdumgai noted that Compaq is now selling preconfigured Linux Clusters if you happen to have any weather patterns sitting around needing to be analyzed or something. But this is a pretty substantial bit of heft behind Linux as a valid Clustering platform, as well as an easier way to get one.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
If anyone had actually taken the time to read the linked page at Compaq, they would have noticed that this is NOT a high-performance (beowulf) cluster.
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This is a high-availibility cluster, the idea being that one of the machines can die without losing anything. Kinda like RAID taken to the systems level.
That linux lacks this has been one of Microsoft's marketing points, so this is a really good thing. Unfortunately, the mirroring software is not open source or free software.
Nope. The best HP will guarantee with Win2K on a single server is 99.9, with a 24-hour on-site tech. That's THREE nines, not five. They will also be happy to sell you a Win2K HA cluster, but there again they will only guarantee you 99.99, once again with a 24-hour on-site tech. That's FOUR nines, not five. HP does sell a couple systems that claim five, but they're MPE/IX and don't exactly fit what one would call a 'single' system.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I work for a company that had puchased several compaq DL580's and evaluated a few different cluster/failover/HA solutions. The decision to to with LifeKeeper was made just before I joined the company.
It has been part of my job to get the system implememted with RH6.2, Apache, Informix and a shared mass storage device.
A bit of background on LifeKeeper first. Lifekeeper is a process monitoring tool that monitors a number of services and its dependencies, and manages the re-start and failover of these services to a group of defined servers.
If you can imagine a stacks of servers with, for example, a firewall, a web server, and a db server as a unit, you can implement failover in a N+N configuration.
primary.......backup
firewall......firewall
apache........apache
informix......informix
Each layer has a virtual Ip that flips back and forth between primary and failover so that each layer knows how to talk up and down to the other layers blindly.
We found that we had to do a lot of custom work to get everything implemented the way we wanted it.
The Informix kit was a bit messy to failover, however apache and tomcat failed over very well. we had some issues with the NFS kit, as our Informix DB was mounted on the shared mass store.
We had and still have some issues with our firewalls. We are using gShield (ipchains) for our firewalls, and the gshieldconf tool allows for only one IP per box, and we had the real IP's plus a Virtual IP that floated between the firealls. (our production url resolves to this virtual IP). We loose connectivity to our primary firewall on its _real_ ip, and must access it from the VirtIP. It went on to cause us problems with routing mail up thru the stacks, with accessing customer sites from behind the firewalls, and a few other things. Bottom line, Lifekeeper doesnt work so well to fail firewalls over.
It is pretty neat to watch apache or informix or tomcat (or our firewalls for that matter) to flip over from the primary to failover box.
It ends up that all services that LifeKeeper Monitors need to be started by lifekeepr with some command such as: perfome_action -t apache -a restore, instead of apachecrl start.
we are putting ssl on the boxes right now and will see how Lifekeeper handles mod_ssl!
Neat product, would love to see it open.
Its also too bad, because the dl580's compaq sent us took about 3 weeks to get up and running, lots of wierd hardware problems with the pci bus.