Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:16:00 GMT
VCS’ hagui is basically pointless, but I do like a live diagram of what’s going on when I’m creating new service groups. I also like my Mac, so here’s the quick how-to on getting it working on the Mac.
Extract the VRTScscm package from the install media, and copy it somewhere permanent. I’m using my home directory.
$ gzip -dc VRTScscm.tar.gz | (cd /tmp; tar xf -)
$ mv /tmp/VRTScscm/reloc/opt ${HOME}
Fix the VCS_HOME and JAVA_HOME variables in the hagui script.
VCS_HOME="${HOME}/opt/VRTSvcs"
JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
I create a symlink for convenience.
$ ln -s ../opt/VRTSvcs/bin/hagui ${HOME}/bin
Job’s done. While you’re here, this is the best video on YouTube, JFYI.
Posted in Veritas, Apple, Clustering | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 29 May 2007 18:53:00 GMT
Wow, 24 days passed really quickly…
The trials we were doing with Veritas Cluster Services for UNIX worked out nicely; I’ll have some stuff to write up regarding a consolidation project that I’ll be finishing up in the next few months. On which note, I haven’t forgotten the Solaris Cluster on the Cheap series, I’ve just been crazy busy and away a fair amount of my spare time.
We had a pair of x4500s turn up for some trials today. First trial was getting the damn things to the server room; at 96kg each when boxed it was a matter of removing all 48 disks, the power supplies and the service controller from each, leaving the chassis to be lugged a little more easily.
Huge congratulations to stitch and Dick; they know what for, but I don’t know if they want it common knowledge.
To close, I just discovered that a 16 week old boy can happily hit you from 3 feet away, if you see what I mean…
Posted in General, Sun, Veritas, Clustering | no comments
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
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.
Posted in Solaris, Sun, Veritas, Clustering | 1 comment
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:50:00 GMT
From the installation notes of a popular high availability solution:
# mkdir /.ssh
# chmod go-w /
# chmod 700 /.ssh
# chmod go-rwx /.ssh
They’re thorough, at least.
Posted in Software, Veritas, Clustering | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:52:00 GMT
Where I work, I look after three highly available clusters running Veritas Cluster Services on Solaris. The hardware is old enough that maintenance is becoming prohibitively expensive and we’re therefore planning to buy new hardware over the next six months or so. Veritas tried to hold us over a barrel over support costs not so long ago, and so this seemed to be a good time to investigate moving to a different HA system.
The obvious choice for me was Solaris Cluster 3.2 (or Sun Cluster 3.2 as it was called at release). It had originally seemed that what I wanted to do would be suboptimal, although the release of 3.2 completely fixed all of the issues that existed with the setup that I had wanted to implement.
Mmm, free
Additionally good is that Solaris Cluster is free to run, even in production, although it must be relicensed (at a reasonably rate) if you wish to buy support. It also supports a large variety of server and storage hardware. Therefore it was no hassle to just download the software and crack on with testing; one barrier to adoption nipped in the bud.
What, no host-based packet filter?
After testing out the design that I had envisioned, it seemed that everything that I had wanted the software to do was in there; the only fly in the ointment was that the IP Filter packet filter was not supported. It worked for some scenarios, but the lack of official support would have been a problem for us.
At around this time, the QA manager for Solaris Cluster, John Blair, happened to post a blog entry introducing himself on the Sun Cluster Oasis[1]. So I asked him about the IP Filter situation.
Ask, and ye shall receive
Less than six weeks later, IP Filter is officially supported for failover services. That’s an amazing response time. I’m not even a paying customer.
Professional services
Even before discovering this little nugget, I proceeded to obtain quotes for the licensing and support costs for Solaris Cluster 3.2. As I mentioned above, they’re quite reasonable.
However, I was told at this point that there was a requirement for Sun Professional Services to come in perform the installation and configuration of the cluster before support could be obtained, and this was far from reasonably priced. At this point I was pretty angry and a little disappointed; I’m a big fan of Sun and couldn’t see why they would throw away customers like this.
I went far enough to complain about it publicly, although it was later pointed out that there was an option for a simple installation validation which is much more reasonable and by pointing this out I hereby absolve myself from the FUD-spreading.
You coming or what?
At this point it’s still not clear that we’ll end up running Solaris Cluster on these platforms, but I’m hopeful that we will. The design that I want to implement slots right in to the Solaris Cluster design and the implementation is therefore very simple and easy to understand (and, by extension, it’s easier to document, which is more the point for me!).
The title of this post is a small admission that I may be starting to sound like this around the office, sorry guys :)
[1] Note to Sun Marketing; there’s some rebranding to be done here :)
Posted in Software, Solaris, Sun, Clustering, Veritas | Tags cluster, ha, solaris, sun | 2 comments
