Linux-HA release 2
One of the capabilities most-often identified as being necessary for Linux to be considered a world-class server operating system is High-Availability (HA) services.
High-Availability systems provide the illusion of continuous operation for a cluster of computers where one computer takes over for another in the event of hardware or software failures and planned administrative events.
The Linux-HA project has been reliably providing HA services for about 10,000 clusters in the Linux community since 1999. However, in the past customers have restricted to two-node clusters, and it did not monitor services. These two items were by far the most commonly requested improvements for HA clusters.
Release 2 of Linux-HA, currently being tested,solves both of these problems and also addresses more sophisticated installations, bringing it to parity with most commercial HA systems, and exceeding the capabilities of many.
It is the purpose of this talk to provide an overview of Linux-HA, and to talk in detail about the capabilities of release 2, and how they are implemented.
Alan Robertson
Alan Robertson (a.k.a. alanr@unix.sh) founded the Linux-HA
development effort, is happily employed by the IBM Linux
Technology Center (LTC) to be the Linux-HA project
leader, He created a good bit of the content of this web site. He has a
set of test clusters in his
basement. For historical details, see his biography.
Alan is known to be opinionated, enthusiastic, has a sense of humor which ranges from whimsical to slightly outrageous, a certain fondness for memorable phrases, and a friend who makes HAts for him, and a lovely and intelligent wife who is making LinuxQuilts for him.
Themes Alan is known to repeat over and over:
His theory is "When ya don't know many tunes, ya gotta sing da ones ya know". It comes as no surprise to people who know him that he has a T-shirt which says "Real Men Sing Real Loud".
A few of his favorite things from the HA world. Some serious, some amusing.
- His favorite acronym is STONITH
- His favorite picture is ThePyramidPicture
For the excessively weird out there, he offers this collection of pictures of him - found by Google, and one from OLS2002, On a similarly excessive note, there is an interview with him.