[Discuss] Redundant array of inexpensive servers: clustering?

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

Bill Ricker wrote:
> (Split-brain is why i've avoided remote auto-restart. If you need
> distributed HA, you need to architect for hot-hot distributed
> load-balancing -- not easily retrofitted to monolithic legacy apps!)

This is a lot of why there's no such thing as a turnkey HA cluster 
installation.

We've discussed clusters of hardware but that's the easy part. It's just 
computers and switches and cables and storage.

The hard part is making it work. Making it work entails examining every 
service, identifying all of each service's resources and dependencies, 
figuring out how to automatically start and stop services if this isn't 
already there, and encapsulating everything in service groups that work 
together.

How hard could it be? Really hard. Designing and building reliable HA 
clusters from scratch is one of the hardest things a sysadmin can be 
called upon to do.

-- 
Rich P.