The Low-Rent Cluster Project - Introduction
This is a new project I'm documenting in my blog. I'm going to cross-post the entries here and on 
debian, and I welcome comments.
One of the problems with working with AlphaServers for so long is that one ends up with champagne tastes. The catch is that I operate my office network in a beer budget. Relatively speaking, it's more like a Milwaukee's Best budget. Linux is good about working on servers that fit my budget, particularly since I don't plan on using X.
Running standalone Linux systems on low-rent equipment is one thing. Making that low-rent equipment highly available is a totally different issue. For openers, older, inexpensive systems often need upgrades to get them to a point where they can be clustered. Then there's the issue of shared storage. Storage Area Networks SANs) aren't supposed to be low-rent. SAN users want good quality equipment and are willing to pay for it. I want something that will work in my rack here in my home office, and I'm not willing to pay for it.
This isn't an original thought on my part. Others have looked at what can be done to make systems highly available without a true SAN. The obvious solution for low-rent is to forget doing a shared bus configuration in the first place, opting for a Distributed Replicated Block Device DRBD) configuration. But that's where my champagne tastes come in. I'm used to TruClusters, and a TruCluster requires a storage system on a shared SCSI or fibre-channel. Both of those are way out of my beer budget. My two tried-and-true BA350 storage shelves got trashed in the flood, so starting a shared SCSI configuration from scratch was going to be expensive. In the grand scheme of things, iSCSI isn't expensive, particularly when compared to a fibre SAN, but it's still more than I wanted to pay.
I put the dilemma to the folks in the Debian community on Live Journal, and got back an interesting suggestion: use firewire! Sure, why not, I've got an external firewire enclosure I use it with my Acer TravelMate C104 tablet PC), so it was worth a try.
The choice of which cluster solution to go with for this project was a no-brainer. I want a low-rent TruCluster, so that means an OpenSSI system. OpenSSI's Cluster File System CFS) is a kindred spirit to TruCluster's CFS; it's no surprise that the leaders in the OpenSSI community are HP employees. There are downsides to OpenSSI, most notably that it's not as mature a product as the Linux-HA project. As a result, my choices for Linux distro are much more limited. That may present more challenges, but we'll see.
[Linux-Blog]
Permanent link to this entry)
debian, and I welcome comments.One of the problems with working with AlphaServers for so long is that one ends up with champagne tastes. The catch is that I operate my office network in a beer budget. Relatively speaking, it's more like a Milwaukee's Best budget. Linux is good about working on servers that fit my budget, particularly since I don't plan on using X.
Running standalone Linux systems on low-rent equipment is one thing. Making that low-rent equipment highly available is a totally different issue. For openers, older, inexpensive systems often need upgrades to get them to a point where they can be clustered. Then there's the issue of shared storage. Storage Area Networks SANs) aren't supposed to be low-rent. SAN users want good quality equipment and are willing to pay for it. I want something that will work in my rack here in my home office, and I'm not willing to pay for it.
This isn't an original thought on my part. Others have looked at what can be done to make systems highly available without a true SAN. The obvious solution for low-rent is to forget doing a shared bus configuration in the first place, opting for a Distributed Replicated Block Device DRBD) configuration. But that's where my champagne tastes come in. I'm used to TruClusters, and a TruCluster requires a storage system on a shared SCSI or fibre-channel. Both of those are way out of my beer budget. My two tried-and-true BA350 storage shelves got trashed in the flood, so starting a shared SCSI configuration from scratch was going to be expensive. In the grand scheme of things, iSCSI isn't expensive, particularly when compared to a fibre SAN, but it's still more than I wanted to pay.
I put the dilemma to the folks in the Debian community on Live Journal, and got back an interesting suggestion: use firewire! Sure, why not, I've got an external firewire enclosure I use it with my Acer TravelMate C104 tablet PC), so it was worth a try.
The choice of which cluster solution to go with for this project was a no-brainer. I want a low-rent TruCluster, so that means an OpenSSI system. OpenSSI's Cluster File System CFS) is a kindred spirit to TruCluster's CFS; it's no surprise that the leaders in the OpenSSI community are HP employees. There are downsides to OpenSSI, most notably that it's not as mature a product as the Linux-HA project. As a result, my choices for Linux distro are much more limited. That may present more challenges, but we'll see.
[Linux-Blog]
Permanent link to this entry)
