Within Reason

Solaris Cluster on the cheap - prologue

Posted by Ceri Davies Wed, 02 May 2007 20:22:00 GMT

Part 1 of a series on setting up Solaris Cluster for no money

Contents

• Prologue
• Part 1
• Part 2

As I’ve written before, I was hoping to deploy Solaris Cluster at work.

I never did manage to find out what the recurring support costs for it were, but it turns out that there is another flaw; the documentation explicitly disallows running different major versions of Solaris within the same cluster, something that Veritas’ Cluster Services explicitly does allow. That’s fine for some projects, but not having an upgrade path for the project under consideration is unacceptable, so we stuck with VCS; I’ll write about this project at a later date, as it’s essentially a massive consolidation project on Niagara boxes which is quite fun.

However, I’m not down on Solaris Cluster. I’m a little annoyed (and I’d be fucking appalled if I were a shareholder) that Sun took a long time to fail to find me recurrent costs, a little more annoyed that, when I pointed out that this wasn’t even the reason we were choosing a different product and would they like to sell me 200 Sun Ray clients instead, I didn’t get so much as a response, and just plain disappointed that there are no X4500s available in the UK for Try and Buy at the moment.

With that off my chest, I’ll proceed in the next post to discuss how to use Solaris Cluster and Solaris Express to set up a high-ish availability cluster for no money, probably with GlassFish in there somewhere so that I can win a huge TV.