High Availability

Sometimes customers want to have a very simple Galera Cluster set-up. They do not want to invest into machines and build up the know-how for load balancers in front of the Galera Cluster.

For this type of customers there is a possibility to just run a VIP controlled by Corosync/Pacemaker in front of the Galera Cluster moving an IP address from one node to the other. But this is just an active/passive/passive set-up and reads and writes are only possible to one node at the time.
So you loose the scaling …

If you are already familiar with MySQL and you are challenged to operate a serious MySQL Enterprise infrastructure this training is the right one for you.

Requirements

You are familiar with the MySQL basics and have already some experience with MySQL operations. The SQL language does not look strange to you any more. Further you are familiar with the Linux console and rule the most important UNIX commands.

Audience

• MySQL Enterprise application developer and DevOps
• MySQL and MariaDB database administrators …

After properly installing and testing a Galera Cluster we see that the set-up is not finished yet. It needs something in front of the Galera Cluster that balances the load over all nodes.
So we install a load balancer in front of the Galera Cluster. Typically nowadays HAProxy is chosen for this purpose. But then we find, that the whole Galera Cluster is still not high available in case the load balancer fails or dies. So we need a second load balancer for high availability.
But how should we properly …

Recently we had to set-up a 3-node Galera Cluster with a Load Balancer in front of it. Because Galera Cluster nodes (mysqld) still reply to TCP requests on port 3306 when they are expelled from the Cluster it is not sufficient to just leave it to the Load Balancer to check the port if a Galera node is properly running or not.

We used the wsrep_notify_cmd variable to hook our own script into the Galera Cluster which disables each Node on the Load Balancer when its state changed.

# my.cnf
#
[mysqld] …

You are already familiar with the MySQL or MariaDB and you are challenged to operate a serious MySQL database. If this is the case this training is the right one for you.

Requirements

You are familiar with the MySQL basics and have already some experience with MySQL or MariaDB operations. The SQL language does not look strange to you any more. Further you are familiar with the Linux console and rule the most important UNIX commands.

Audience

• MySQL application developer
• MySQL and MariaDB database …

Hallo MySQL Gemeinde,

Im neuen iX (2012-10) hat es zwei nette Artikel über: MySQL HA-Lösungen (S. 116) und MySQL 5.6 (S. 66).

Viel Spass beim Lesen!

There is a product out in the wild which is called SchoonerSQL
[ 1
] from an American company called Schooner Information Technology
[ 2
]. They claim to have top-performance
[ 3
] and high-availability features with up 99.999% availability
[ 1
].
The technology seems to be based on InnoDB, SSD and some kind of replication with failover mechanism.

Unfortunately this product is neither open source nor is it really transparent what they are doing. Which is quite suspicious… Because this lack of …

Helsinki, Finland, Uster, Switzerland – February 18, 2012 – Codership, the provider of Galera Cluster for MySQL, and FromDual, a MySQL consulting company, today announced collaboration to offer Galera Cluster technology and related support and consulting services for Galera users all over the world, especially in German speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH). Galera Cluster is a synchronous, true multi-master replication cluster for MySQL using the well known InnoDB storage engine. …

Introduction

Galera is a synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL. It is therefore in competition with several other MySQL architectures:

• Master-Master Replication with MySQL
• MySQL Cluster
• The non-open source product called Schooner

Very often they can be easily replaced by Galera’s synchronous Multi-Master Replication for MySQL.

All those products have some advantages and disadvantages. Very often MySQL Master-Master Replication is used in the field because of its simplicity to set-up. But …

Galera features

Galera provides the following features:

• Synchronous replication
• Active/active multi-master topology
• Read and write to any cluster node
• Automatic membership control, failed nodes drop from the cluster
• Automatic node joining
• True parallel row level replication
• Direct client connections
• Drop-in replacement for native MySQL

Galera benefits

Benefits using Galera Replication:

• High Availability
• No slave lag
• No lost transactions
• No more data inconsistency
• Smaller client latencies
• Read scalability …

In the following article I have summarized some steps and hints to set-up a MySQL active/passive failover Cluster also sometimes called MySQL HA.

With such a set-up you can achieve a 99.99% (4x9) HA set-up for MySQL (52 minutes downtime per year). The same procedure also works for PostgreSQL, Oracle and other database systems running on Linux (DRBD runs on Linux only).

The concept

The concept of an active/passive failover Cluster is the following:

• You have 2 servers (also called nodes).
• They communicate …

The FromDual Performance Monitor for MySQL has now a new module for monitoring DRBD. Since more an more of our customers want to run MySQL High Availability solutions based on DRBD we have implemented this module.

We gather all information which are reported with the command:

# cat /proc/drbd

version: 8.3.8 (api:88/proto:86-94)
 0: cs:Connected ro:Secondary/Primary ds:UpToDate/UpToDate C r----
    ns:1241240 nr:14311680 dw:15033532 dr:1241281 al:198 bm:52 lo:0 pe:0 ua:0
    ap:0 ep:1 wo:b oos:0

Now you …

The following solutions are used with MySQL:

• Redhat Cluster Suite (RHCS)
• SteelEye LiefKeeper
• Heartbeat (from the Linux HA project), Using Linux HA Heartbeat
• Crossroads
• Failover
• DRBD, Using MySQL with DRBD
• MySQL Cluster

The following presentations are available:

When I set-up a MySQL HA environment for customers I usually do some final failover tests after configuring the whole beast.

To check if the application behaves like expected I always run my little test application (test.sh) from the server(s) where the customers application runs. It displays “graphically” how the application behaves and you can show to the customer immediately what is going on…

Make sure, that you point it to the virtual IP (VIP) or the load balancer (LB).

It was really …

Electing a slave as new master and aligning the other slaves to the new master

In a simple MySQL Replication set-up you have high-availability (HA) on the read side (r). But for the master which covers all the writes (w) and the time critical read (rt) there is no HA implemented. For some situations this can be OK. For example if you have rarely writes or if you can wait until a new Master is set up.

But in other cases you need a fast failover to a new master.

In the following article it is shown how to …