Just as OCFS2 and GFS2 are converging on some of their in-kernel
components, I am happy to announce that similar convergence is
starting to occur elsewhere in the cluster stack.
Over the last few months, Red Hat and SUSE engineers have been working
together to port Heartbeat's powerful Cluster Resource Manager (CRM)
to run natively on top of OpenAIS.
OpenAIS is an OSI Certified implementation of the Service Availability
Forum Application Interface Specification (AIS) and forms the
foundation of the open source clustering stack shared by Novell/SUSE,
Red Hat, and Oracle.
Running natively on top of OpenAIS gives the cluster manager access to
the many features it provides:
- event service
- message service
- checkpoint service
- distributed locking service
- cluster membership service
- extended virtual synchrony service
- cluster closed process group service
More importantly, it means that applications being managed by the
cluster can also make use of such services and can do so on
forthcoming versions of both RHEL and SLES.
Applications that already use OpenAIS can also be managed by the CRM
more reliably than before - since by using the same communication and
membership services, they will always have the same view of the cluster.
There are a number of items yet to be completed, the most critical
being to plug the cluster manager into to a fencing subsystem, however
2, 4 and 6 node clusters have been responding well to automated
testing (which is incredibly harsh on the cluster) and the software
has been given a clean bill of health by Valgrind. This is of course
in addition to the rigorous release testing of OpenAIS itself.
Completing the port is a top priority for SUSE's cluster team in 2008.
Packages for OpenAIS^ and the CRM^^ can be found for most major
distros on the OpenSUSE Build Service:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/ha-clustering/
Just look for packages with an openais prefix.
More information on the CRM^^ and OpenAIS^ can be found at http://linux-ha.org/v2
and http://www.openais.org respectively.
^ The OpenAIS packages include a couple of required patches that
haven't yet been shipped by the OpenAIS project. When configuring
OpenAIS, one also needs to include the following in openais.conf so
that the child process that controls resources has permission to do so.
aisexec {
user: root
group: root
}
^^ Currently, the openais-crm packages can only be used with OpenAIS.
Choosing a communications layer at run-time is possible but not yet
implemented.
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