Blah, blah, Solaris Cluster
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 :)
