RED HAT CLUSTER

SUITE
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RED HAT CLUSTER SUITE
OVERVIEW
What is Red Hat Cluster Suite
Red Hat server is a suite of packages that
can be used to deploy highly available
services on Red Hat Linux-based servers

Provides three main features:

Cluster management and service failover
Network load-balancing (LVS)
Global read-write file system (GFS) (HPC)
 What is required to run a
cluster?
Two or more Servers either physical or
Virtual.
Two or more bonded NICs to send cluster
heartbeat messages over (this is optional,
but highly recommended!)
Two or more bonded NICs dedicated to
public network traffic
Supported fencing solution
Shared storage
What does a cluster consist of?
An HA cluster typically consists of the following items:
Two or more nodes
One or more fence devices
Shared storage
Public and private network interfaces
One or more resources
One or more services
Quorum devices
Failover Domains
 Quorum devices

Quorum is used to ensure that a majority of nodes are

available in the cluster
Needed to avoid split-brain conditions
Works by assigning one or more votes to each server and
quorum device in the cluster
To ensure quorum, a cluster needs to have 51% of the
available votes to form or continue running an
operational cluster
 Fencing devices
Fencing devices provide a way for the cluster to remove
an unresponsive node from the cluster
Nodes are typically fenced when they are unresponsive,
and fencing is done to prevent split brain configurations
Several supported ways to fence nodes:
IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface)
Power Fencing
SAN fencing
VMware virtual centre fencing, RHEVM, KVM fencing etc.
Vendor specific methods
HP ILO (Integrated Lights Out)
Dell DRAC ( Dell Remote Access Control)
IBM Blade Centres
 Cluster resources
Cluster resources provide the basic unit of configuration in a
cluster
Several types of resources exist by default:
Apache
GFS
MYSQL
Oracle
Samba
NFS
Tomcat
IP Address
Start/Stop Scripts
Services
 Cluster Services/ Resource
Group
Services are collections of resources that serve a specific
purpose
An example of this would be an HA APACHE service that
contains three resources:
An IP address resource that is tied to the APACHE
webpage database instance
File system resources that contain the web page ex:
/var/www/html
httpd services that starts, stops and verifies that http is
running (script: /etc/init.d/httpd)
 Failover domains

Failover domains allow you to define where services

should go when a service faults and is migrated to
another node

Each failover domain can have a unique list of nodes, and

each node can be assigned a priority to tell the cluster it
is a better candidate to run the service
Red Hat Cluster Components

Luci
Ricci
Conga
CMAN (Cluster Manager)
RGManager (Resource Group Manager)
CLVM ( Clustered LVM)
GFS (Global File System)
CLVM OVERVIEW
Clvm:
CLVM Clustered LVM
Provides volume management of cluster storage.
A cluster-wide version of LVM2
CLVM provides the same capabilities as LVM2 on a single node, but
makes the logical volumes created with CLVM available to all nodes
in a cluster.
CLVM uses the lock-management service provided by the cluster
infrastructure.
Using CLVM requires minor changes to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf for cluster
wide locking.
clvmd:
A daemon that provides clustering extensions to the standard
LVM2 tool
set and allows LVM2 commands to manage shared storage.
Runs on each cluster node.
Distributes LVM metadata updates in a cluster, thereby presenting
each cluster node with the same view of the logical volumes
GFS Global File system Overview
Pictorial Representation of GFS cluster
 GFS- Global File System
The Red Hat GFS file system is a native file system that interfaces
directly with the Linux kernel file system interface (VFS layer). A GFS file
system can be implemented in a standalone system or as part of a
cluster configuration. When implemented as a cluster file system, GFS
employs distributed metadata and multiple journals.

A GFS file system can be created on an LVM logical volume. A logical

volume is an aggregation of underlying block devices that appears as a
single logical device

GFS is based on a 64-bit architecture, which can theoretically

accommodate an 8 EB file system. However, the current supported
maximum size of a GFS file system is 25 TB.

GFS supports up to 125 GFS nodes.