Development [LWN.net]

Linux-HA reaches the 2.0 milestone

The High-Availability Linux Project (Heartbeat) is aimed at the management of Linux clusters:

The basic goal of the High Availability Linux project is to: Provide a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) through a community development effort. The Linux-HA project is a widely used and important component in many interesting High-Availability solutions. We estimate that we currently have around ten thousand installations up in mission-critical uses in the real world since it became production-ready in 1999. Interest in this project continues to grow.

[Linux-HA] LWN.net looked at Heartbeat 1.0.1 in March, 2003; the project has grown considerably since then. It currently runs on a wide variety of Linux distributions, and supports the ia32, ia64, amd64, PPC, zSeries mainframe, and OpenPower platforms.

Version 2.0.0 of Linux-HA was announced this week. "This release extends the capabilities of Linux-HA far beyond anything available in the past, and provides basic capabilities comparable to any commercial HA package. This release provides support for monitoring of resources (services) and support for larger clusters - we have tested up to 16-node clusters. In Release 2, simple clusters are simple to create, and more complex clusters can take advantage of our rule-based resource placement methods to ensure that the cluster does exactly what is desired when failures occur."

New features in the 2.0.0 release include:

Improvements to the messaging and logging systems.
Support for multi-node clusters up to and beyond 16 nodes.
Five new components including an information base, resource managers, and a policy engine.
Support for Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH).
Support for OCF and LSB resource agents.
Support for cluster grouping and cloning.
Resource location and ordering constraint support.
A choice of failback, failure and "No Quorum" behaviors.
Cluster state and configuration monitoring tools.

The version 2 Fact Sheet provides a full overview of capabilities for the new release. The Linux-HA FAQ document gives some basic information on the project, and illustrates some typical uses and problem solutions.

Congratulations go to the Linux-HA developers for making this big step forward. The code is available for download in source and RPM formats here.

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