Ready for high availability in Ubuntu 12.04?! :)
High availability in Linux has seen lots of changes in recent years. This is a result of an effort to merge most relevant HA stacks in Linux world – RedHat Cluster Suite and Linux-HA. Work upstream did on this is tremendous and one can only congratulate on that. Unfortunately, for us following this development, that meant we had to keep track with all those changes in the code and configuration. That’s why, for 10.04, we had official packages in the distribution and backported and supported packages in ubuntu-ha-maintainers PPA. We hope that for 12.04 PPA will not be required any more :)
HA in Ubuntu is based on Pacemaker 1.1.6. One can use both GFS2 and/or OCFS2 shared filesystems on top of shared storage (DRBD or any other type of shared hardware storage).
To make deploying HA easier for users and system administrators, we’ve started a WIKI explaining most common setups. At the moment, this wiki covers only how to initially setup GFS2 and OCFS2 shared filesystems on a shared storage. In few days, we’ll add guides for DRBD, cLVM and guides for some migration scenarios – 10.04 -> 12.04; 10.04 + PPA -> 12.04, etc.
Important: We’ve encountered couple of bugs that are in the queue for fixing. If you are using or have a desire of using cLVM, please do not use 12.04 yet. Once these fixes land into archives, we’ll send an email to ubuntu-ha mailing list and add cLVM howto to the wiki.