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

[Andrew Beekhof]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Digimer <linux at alteeve.com> wrote:
> 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. :)

No argument there.

> 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.

Pacemaker will be celebrating its 8th anniversary this year.
So it's not a spring chicken either ;-)