[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk in multiple data centers

[Grant Gainey]

Hi Stefan,

In general, I think you've hit the salient points.  Comments inline.

----- Original Message -----
> Hello world,
> 
> are there any "best practice" documents for deploying Spacewalk
> servers to multiple data centers in a way that clients will
> load-balance and failover on their own? I think there are a number of
> challenges here:
> 
> 1. The actual loadbalancing of HTTP(S) requests. That should be easy
>    to handle. Some care should be taken WRT certificates, but that
>    shouldn't be a major problem.

Aye, pretty well-understood issues here.

> 2. The (Oracle) database. Should be pretty easy to, set up a physical
>    standby and if the primary fails, switchover to the standby
>    instance, promote it, edit rhn.conf, restart Spacewalk servers.

Sure, sounds reasonable.

> 3. Actually getting the RPM files from one server to the other -
>    rsync'ing them seems like the safest bet.

Don't forget about cobbler's data.

> 4. Taskomatic tasks - this one seems like the only real challenge: We
>    don't want both spacewalk servers to e.g. scheduele automatic
>    errata updates, or send reports.

Yeah, you only want one taskomatic running, for that very reason.  And anything taskomatic does to/from disk (like, say, cobbler-syncing) will only be on disks available to the instance where taskomatic is running.

> Did I miss anything important here? Has anyone already done a setup
> like this and would like to share his/her experience?

If you're looking at redundancy in the same DC, then fast disk shared by all instances keeps your disk-data in sync automatically.

If you actually mean "different data centers", then you'll have to get that dealt with - as you say, rsync or something like it.

I don't know that we have anything formal written up around this - maybe someone else will chime in...

Grant