Building A Xen High Availability Cluster

Hi All,

I just want to share a very good article written by Sander van Vught that guides you to setting up a HA Xen solution based on Heartbeat (clustering software) , ISCSI and OCFS2 (cluster aware file system).

the pdf can be found here : http://www.sandervanvugt.com/heartbeat/xenhadoc.pdf

..and the page containing it along with other good info here : http://www.sandervanvugt.nl/en/aankondigin...documentation-0

* OCFS2 is optional (and so is ISCSI is you have other means of offering shared storage).

Personally I prefer using LVM (logical volumes) over OCFS2 to supply my VMs with hard drive space seeing it gives a cleaner and more transparent setup, but if you need a cluster aware file system OCFS2 can be a good option to use.
Best of all, whatever choice you make, all products are included in OpenSUSE 10.3 and up (don't let it fool you that the document is written for SLES10sp1, Opensuse's got it to ).

Combined with the documentation over at OpenSUSE.org you should be able to build a very solid solution

Some basics for people that are getting familiar with virtualisation
http://en.opensuse.org/Virtualization_Terminology

Howto install Xen
http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_Install_a_Xen_VM_Server


As note: don't expect this to be a setup done in half a day but prepare yourself & take the time for it (spread it out over a couple of days) and you will grow to love it

Hope you find it useful!

Credits go to Sander..

Cheers,

Wj