Clustering Active and Active node

[Yong Ping]

Hi,

We are currently using MS Clustering, active and passive node model as our High availability solution, and we are presently exploring of having active and active node model.

Just wondering, and perhaps share with us on this implementation approach of having active and active node.

Topic

[John Hamilton]

Where I used to work we had an Active Active model.  It worked out rather well. But we were using AIX HA. So to give you any information about how MS does it is beyond my knowledge.

[David Harrison]

We are currently running Cloverleaf on a Solaris active/passive cluster. Two servers are connected to a RAID array where the Cloverleaf sites reside. The active server owns the array and in the event of failover, the passive server assumes ownership of the array and Cloverleaf is restarted by clustering scripts.

I would be most interested to see how Cloverleaf could be set up to run in active/active mode.

[John Hamilton]

We were running multiple sites. So we divided the raid subsystem with have the drives on one side half on the other.  Then installed 2 sites on machine A’s drives  and 3 sites on machine B’s drives.  We also had services addresses that failed over on the boxes as well.

The fail over moved the drives and service address over then we had scripts to stop and start the sites.  Over all it worked well.

[Yong Ping]

Thank you so much for those ideas.  

By the way, anyone experience using Microsoft virtualisation before.  I am thinking to leverage this to have the active/active model.

[Dennis Pfeifer]

We’re moving our test environment to VM.

My hope at this time, is to move production to a VM environment in March 2009 .. hopefully on Cloverleaf 5.7

Dennis

[Charlie Bursell]

You need to be aware of the following as per Rey Currie

1. Cloverleaf is certified against processor chipset and operating system combination.

2. VMWare is not an operating system, therefore Cloverleaf is not certified against VMWare.

3. VMWare is certified to work with a list of  processor chipset and operating system combinations for running within their virtual machines.

4.Cloverleaf will work within VMWare virtual machine – as long as the processor/OS environment running within that virtual machine is on the Cloverleaf certified processor/OS list.

i.e.: VMWare certifies Windows 2003/Xeon to run within a virtual machine. Cloverleaf is certified on Windows 2003/Xeon. VMWare guarantees that an application, in this case, Cloverleaf,  that is certified on Windows 2003/Xeon natively will run as normal within a VMWare Windows 2003/Xeon Virtual Machine.

To wit, Cloverleaf will work within VMWare virtual machine – as long as the OS/chip set combination running within that virtual machine is on the Cloverleaf certified OS/chip set certification list.

[Yong Ping]

Thanks and Noted on the VMware and QDX/Cloverleaf certified list.

Is there any other things (side affected) of having QDX/Cloverleaf on VMWare i.e. performances, security and etc. ?.  I read some article on VMWare, and knowing that software/hardware compatibility and security were the main concerned.

[Robert Denny]

It has been a few years since this topic was updated. We are wanting to modify our Cloverleaf Cluster to a similar design.

I am searching for the Certified OS/Chipset. Is that posted on Clovertech?

One other question, is there an advantage to having an Active/Active node configuration as compared to the an Active/passive node configuration?

[Author]

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