SGI - Developer Central Open Source

URL: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/failsafe/

LINUX FAILSAFE NOW AT VERSION 1.0.4.

SGI's Linux FailSafe is the premiere next generation High-Availability (HA) solution for business critical applications. It provides a simple way to make your applications HA without having to resort to rewriting or recompiling or the need to invest in expensive hardware solutions. Linux FailSafe provides a robust clustering environment with resilience from any single point of failure.

Linux FailSafe is architected to scale up to 16 nodes in a cluster with the cluster members sharing storage. Linux FailSafe and shared storage allows multiple servers to assume control of data in the event of a failure. At the point of failure, applications are resumed on the remaining system{s} and filesystems are automatically made available to their applications.

Plugins are the application-specific interface between Linux FailSafe and the application or resource that makes it highly-available. The following table lists the available plugins:

Plugin Name	Description	Author
template	Template is an example plugin that does nothing.	SGI
IP_address	The IP_address plugin manages IP addresses as aliases on the public interface(s) of the nodes. It is normally used as a dependent resource, that the higher-level plugins depend on.	SGI
Filesystem	The Filesystem plugin manages shared disks/filesystems, ensuring that they are mounted only on one node at a time.	SuSE and SGI
file	The file resource is an example which monitors the existence of a file.	SuSE
sap	The sap plugin manages the SAP R/3 Central Instance.	SuSE
Apache	Apache is the most widely deployed Web Server on the Internet. This plugin allows running multiple servers in arbitrary distribution on the nodes of the cluster.	SGI
NFS	NFS (Network FileSystem) is the most common method of sharing files between Unix and Unix-like systems. This plugin supports multiple independent export directories and associated shared disks.	SGI
Samba	The Samba software suite is a collection of programs that implements the SMB protocol for UNIX systems. This protocol is sometimes also referred to as CIFS, LanManager or NetBIOS protocol. This plugin supports running multiple SMB servers in almost arbitrary mix in the cluster.	SGI
sapdb	The sapdb plugin manages the SAP Database server.	SuSE
db2	The db2 plugin manages the DB2 database	SuSE
Oracle	The Oracle plugin manages the Oracle database	SuSE
drbd	DRBD is the latest generation Network Block Device. It allows sharing disk partitions over the network rather than via shared SCSI or Fiber Channel	SuSE

All of the plugins are distributed under the terms of the GPL. We welcome contribution of additional plugins! (file, sap, the original version of Filesystem, db2, Oracle, and drbd were contributed). Please join the FailSafe mailing list if you wish to use or contribute to FailSafe development.

FailSafe is intended to be distribution-agnostic. However, there are dependencies on libraries and paths to system files that do vary from one distribution to the next (mostly it is the location of the init.d directory that varies). Linux FailSafe has been installed on the following distributions (with varying degrees of tweaking):

Distribution Version Comments
RedHat 6.2

SuSE 6.4 NFS export issues

RedHat 7.0

SuSE 7.0

TurboLinux 6.1

SuSE 7.1 some changes in init.d

Debian 2.2 (aka stable) some changes in init.d

RedHat 7.1 some changes in init.d

SuSE 7.2 some changes in init.d

There may be others that haven't been communicated to us...

Please send email to owner-failsafe@oss.sgi.com for updates, changes, or corrections to these pages.