Clustering options

[Matt Olander]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2004 at 04:42:39PM -0800, Justin Hopper wrote:
> My term of "hardware clustering" might have been incorrect.  I'm looking
> more for high availability, but a large pool of resources would be
> beneficial as well.  It would be ideal to have a system where you can
> add new blades as more resources become necessary, instead of adding
> individual servers which each run their own OS and have their own pool
> of resources.

hey Justin,

There's a ton of stuff to help you. A few that come to mind for fail
over are pound, plb, and freevrrpd. They all might do something of what you
are looking for.

For most blade setups, they typically come with some software that
allows you to setup an image server with various server images and
auto-deploy them to various blades. For instance, the Intel blades come
with Veritas OpForce to control image deployment.

It's mostly for restoring from a bare-metal state though. As in, a blade
goes down and you have a rule setup that slot3 is a webserver. So, you
call the data-center tech and tell him to swap out the blade in slot3
(in which you turn on a red indicator light on the front so he knows
which one) with a fresh one, preferrably from the few extra that you had
the foresight to purchase ;)

The system detects that a new blade is in slot3 and deploys the
webserver image, as per your rule. If anything goes wrong, you remote
console in via the built-in management module. That's all in a perfect
world, of course. In reality, Veritas doesn't officially support FreeBSD
as an operating system for their OpForce software, but I'm talking to
them and we'll see if it goes anywhere :P

regards,
-matt

> 
> -- 
> Justin Hopper  <jhopper at bsdhosting.net>
> UNIX Systems Engineer
> BSDHosting.net
> Hosting Division of Digital Oasys Inc.
> http://www.bsdhosting.net

-- 
Matt Olander
(408)943-4100 Phone
(408)943-4101 Fax
www.offmyserver.com
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