[Linux-cluster] Documentation for cluster beginner and pacemaker vs rgmanager

[Digimer]

On 05/10/2011 09:33 AM, Andrew Beekhof wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Tomas Kouba <koubat at fzu.cz> wrote:
>> Hello HA magicians,
>>
>> I would like to bring our services to a more reliable level and I was
>> googling around some
>> basic information about RH cluster suite.
>> I am not quite able to answer 2 questions so I'd like to ask here:
>>
>> 1) What is the starting documentation that you would recommend to a linux
>> administrator who would
>> like to setup a HA cluster? I have found
>> http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/rhel6/rhel_6_cluster_admin/
>> is it good even though I use clone of RHEL? (Scientific Linux 6).
>>
>> 2) Which resource manager would you recommend? rgmanager or pacemaker?
>> The following pages favor pacemaker but the documentation usually says
>> rgmanager:
>> http://www.spinics.net/lists/cluster/msg16401.html
>> http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/wiki/RGManagerVsPacemaker
> 
> Well I'm going to say Pacemaker +
> http://www.clusterlabs.org/doc/en-US/Pacemaker/1.1/html/Clusters_from_Scratch/
> But then you'd expect that since I wrote both :-)
> 
> I think its fair to say that Pacemaker is better than rgmanager, but
> the stars didn't align in time for RHEL6.0 so full support wasn't an
> option.  That said, you're using SL6 so community support on mailing
> lists such as this one might well be sufficient.
> 
> Oh, but the cluster GUI only supports rgmanager if thats important to you.
> Pacemaker does have a shiny integrated CLI though.

I'd agree with Andrew that Pacemaker is better, but I'd also say that
rgmanager has it's bright spots, too. :)

Pacemaker is far more flexible with regard to the resource management
side of things, and rgmanager will be phased out over the next few years
in favour of pacemaker.

The two biggest arguments I'd make in favour of rgmanager are; If your
resource managements needs are within it's capabilities and you are
running RHCS, then it can be configured within the main cluster.conf
file. It is also an old and well tested solution, which some find value in.

-- 
Digimer
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