Version 11.0, 2009-03-11
Abstract
These release notes apply to all SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability 11 based products (e.g. for
x86, x86_64, Itanium, Power and System z). Some
sections may not apply to a particular architecture/product. Where this is
not obvious, the respective architectures are listed explicitly in these notes.
Instructions for installing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability can be found in the
README file on the CD.
Manuals can be found in the docu directory of the
installation media. Any documentation (if installed) can be found in the
/usr/share/doc/ directory of the installed system.
This Novell product includes materials licensed to Novell under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL requires that Novell make available certain source code that corresponds to those GPL-licensed materials. The source code is available for download at http://www.novell.com/linux/source. Also, for up to three years from Novell's distribution of the Novell product, Novell will mail a copy of the source code upon request. Requests should be sent by e-mail to sle_source_request@novell.com or as otherwise instructed at http://www.novell.com/linux/source. Novell may charge a fee to recover its reasonable costs of distribution.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability 11 is an affordable, integrated suite of robust open source clustering technologies that enable enterprises to implement highly available Linux clusters and eliminate single points of failure.
Used with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, it helps firms maintain business continuity, protect data integrity, and reduce unplanned downtime for their mission-critical Linux workloads.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability 11 provides all of the essential monitoring, messaging, and cluster resource management functionality of proprietary third-party solutions, but at a more affordable price, making it accessible to a wider range of enterprises.
It is optimized to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 , and its tight integration ensures customers have the most robust, secure, and up to date, high availability solution. Based on an innovative, highly flexible policy engine, it supports a wide range of clustering scenarios.
Finally, it's open source license minimizes the risk of vendor lock-in, and it's adherence to open standards encourages interoperability with industry standard tools and technologies.
Cluster File System - Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2)
Cluster file systems are used to provide scalable, high performance, and highly available file access across multiple instances of operating systems. Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) is a POSIX-compliant shared-disk cluster file system for Linux. OCFS2 is developed under a GPL open source license.
New features included in OCFS2 with this product release are:
Access Control Lists (ACL)
Quota support
POSIX conforming file locking
expand file system during operation
With these features OCFS2 can be used as generic file system for common use without previous limitations to specific workloads. As the name implies the native workload for OCFS2 is Oracle Database using multiple systems to access a single database to improve overall throughput, and availability in case of a system failure. OCFS2 has now become a more generic file system that can also be used for other workloads. Workloads for OCFS2 included in this product are:
Oracle Database
central storage area for file servers
shared file system for High Availability
all applications using a cluster file system (e.g. Tibco)
The OCFS2 feature can be used independent from the High Availability stack and feature set.
Clustered Logical Volume Manager2 - cLVM2
The Clustered Volume Manager allows multiple nodes to read and write volumes on a single storage device at the block layer level. It features creation and reallocation of volumes on a shared storage infrastructure like SAN or iSCSI, and allows moving volumes to a different storage device during operation. It can be used for volume snapshots for later recovery if needed.
High Availability Cluster Resource Manager (Pacemaker)
High Availability clusters provide services availability in the event of a system failure by using standby resources.
New features introduced by Pacemaker and included with this product release are:
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
Unified command line interface
new policy engine
new cluster communication infrastructure based on openAIS
With unified command line support system setup, managing and integration is made easier. Two cluster communication layers are used within the cluster: heartbeat and openAIS. Workload support for High Availability is facilitated by multiple, ready-to-use resource agents which are included out of then box. To extend High Availability to all types of applications, resource agent templates and examples are provided for customization. For fast failover and shared data access, OCFS2 is included as a cluster file system.
With static or stateless content, the High Availability cluster can be used without a cluster file system. This includes web-services with static content as well as printing systems or communication systems like proxies that do not need to recover data.
Data replication - Distributed Remote Block Device (DRBD)
Data replication is part of a disaster prevention strategy in most large enterprises. Using network connections data is replicated between different nodes to ensure consistent data storages in case of a site failure.
Data replication is provided in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability with DRBD. This software based data replication allows customers to use different types of storage systems and communication layers without vendor lock-in. At the same time, data replication is deeply integrated into the operating system and thus provide ease-of-use. New features related to data replication and included with this product release are:
YaST2 setup tools to assist initial setup
Fully synchronous, memory synchronous or asynchronous modes of operation
Differential storage resynchronization after failure
Bandwidth of background resynchronization tunable
Shared secret to authenticate the peer upon connect
Configurable handler scripts for various DRBD events
Online data verification
With these features data replication can be easier configured and used. And with improved storage resynchronization recovery times will be decreased significantly.
The distributed replicated block device (DRBD) version included supports active/active mirroring, enabling the use of services such as cLVM2 or OCFS2 on top.
IP Load Balancing - Linux Virtual Server (LVS)
Linux Virtual Server (LVS) is an advanced IP load balancing solution for Linux. IP load balancing provides a high-performance, scalable network infrastructure. Such infrastructure is typically used by enterprise customers for webservers or other network related service workloads.
With LVS network requests can be spread over multiple nodes to scale the available resources and balance the resulting workload. By monitoring the compute nodes, LVS can handle node failures and redirect requests to other nodes maintaining the availability of the service.
Support requires an appropriate subscription from Novell; for more information, please see: http://www.novell.com/products/server/services_support.html.
General Support Statement
The following definitions apply:
L1: Installation and problem determination - technical support designed to provide compatibility information, installation and configuration assistance, usage support, on-going maintenance and basic troubleshooting. Level 1 Support is not intended to correct product defect errors.
L2: Reproduction of problem isolation - technical support designed to duplicate customer problems, isolate problem areas and potential issues, and provide resolution for problems not resolved by Level 1 Support.
L3: Code Debugging and problem resolution - technical support designed to resolve complex problems by engaging engineering in patch provision, resolution of product defects which have been identified by Level 2 Support.
Novell will only support the usage of original (unchanged or not recompiled) packages.
Due to an issue in the distributed lock manager code, auto-generation of node ids currently does not work properly, and can cause nodes to lock up when used with OCFS2 or other DLM-based services.
Before starting the cluster services, the administrator must explicitly configure the 'nodeid:' parameter in /etc/ais/openais.conf and assign each cluster node a unique numeric id, starting at 1.
To allow all components in the SLE11 High Availability stack to take advantage of communication media redundancy, it is recommended to configure network bonding. (See SLES11 admin guide).
Part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 High Availability functionality of heartbeat (the cluster resource manager) has been moved to Pacemaker. Heartbeat still owns ccm Consensus Cluster Membership functions and layer, and the lrmd Local Resource Management Daemon, a non-cluster aware daemon that presents a common interface to the supported resource types (interacts directly with resource agents).
Read the READMEs on the CDs.
Get detailed changelog information about a particular package from the RPM:
rpm --changelog -qp <FILENAME>.rpm
<FILENAME>. is the name of the RPM.
Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of CD1 for
a chronological log of all changes made to the updated packages.
Find more information in the docu directory
of CD1 of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability CDs. This directory includes PDF versions
of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability startup and preparation guides.
http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles11/ contains additional or updated documentation for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability.
Visit http://www.novell.com/linux/ for the latest Linux product news from SUSE/Novell and http://www.novell.com/linux/source/ for additional information on the source code of SUSE Linux Enterprise products.
Thanks for using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in your business.
The SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Team.