rawipfel's blog

Hi,

Thought it might be interesting to share some details of a cluster I helped build and demo for the Novell SLE 10 launch at LinuxWorld.

A couple of commenters to Jeff Jaffe's blog, pointed out a potential problem with running many virtual machines on one physical server, creates a much larger outage should the server fail; you lose all those VMs. We agree and designed a solution into SLES10.
With SLES10, you can cluster physical servers and failover VMs from one to another; using traditional cluster resources to manage each VM. SLES10 supports clustering of Xen VMs and the following slides illustrate the Linux World demo - a four node cluster sharing storage over iSCSI, and running two virtual machines as relocatable cluster resoures. The VM OS images are accessible to all nodes thanks to the Oracle cluster file system, and the cluster software monitors the virtual machines to enable local restart and failover between nodes.
http://wiki.novell.com/index.php/Image:LinuxWorld0...

Robert

Hi,

I recently received and am now the proud owner of a new Novell Press book: "Novell Cluster Services for NetWare and Linux".

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0672328453/026-8544332-6987645?v=glance&n=266239

Rob and Sander have done a great job and I can certainly recommend their book to everyone interested in the latest version of Novell Cluster Services for Open Enterprise Server NetWare and Linux. The iSCSI and Cluster Upgrade chapters contain lots of good details, and there's also coverage of Business Continuity Clustering. Thanks a lot Rob and Sander.

Cheers,

Robert

Hi everyone,
Hopefully those of you that own clusters appreciate the value of "no news is good news"
Working clusters don't create news. By design; services are available, users are content, administrators enjoy uptime (and their freetime), and life is brilliant.
And so is the life of a cluster software developer; no news (uhm, blogs) means good news :-) but we're all working hard laying interesting foundations for our highly available futures...
So here's some recent news:
BCC 1.1 is in beta - the next version of Novell's Business Continuance Cluster product for NetWare and now also OES Linux, with a number of great new features including health based auto-site failover, support for mixed (NetWare and Linux) BCC's, and better integration with (CIM/SMI-S based) storage hardware.
(We think SMI-S is an important standard for storage management; and there will be more SMI-S related news in the future).
See http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17291.html for more details and how to join the BCC 1.1 beta program.
From the NCS development lab - the 1.8.2 cluster codebase is now running natively on 64-bit (Linux) servers. We've got mixed 32-bit / 64-bit clusters working too, and are interested in feedback on how you plan (or might expect us to support) 32-bit to 64-bit migrations.
We've been experimenting with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Imho, it's a really interesting technology for building share-disk clusters. Check out SNIA's tutorial: SAS_and_SATA_Revolutionizing_Storage_Architectures.pdf
If anyone is interested in cluster resource health monitoring and automated recovery, we'd love to hear from, we have some stuff running in the lab that leverages the Python process monitors built into ncs-resourced for NCS Linux.
We've also been releasing some of our code into open source. For example, the integration between NCS and EVMS available in OES Linux evolved into some code contributed upstream at evms.sourceforge.net. And we've created an EVMS plugin for SLES10's iSCSI target software. This is kinda cool because it lets you use EVMS tools to create and manage logical (disk) volumes that are automatically exported to iSCSI as whole virtual disks that can be shared by your clustered servers running either OES NetWare or Linux.
Bye for now, Robert