Recently I was asked to provide guidelines for testing fail over of a MySQL configuration that was provided by a hosting provider.
The first observation was the client didn’t have any technical details from the hosting provider of what the moving parts were, and also didn’t have any confirmation other then I think a verbal confirmation that it had been testing.
The first rule in using hosting, never assume. Too many times I’ve seen details from a client stating for example H/W configuration, only to audit and find out otherwise. RAID is a big one, and is generally far more complex to determine. Even for companies with internal systems I’ve seen the most simple question go unanswered. Q: How do you know your RAID is fully operational? A: Somebody will tell us? It’s really amazing to investigate on site with the client to find that RAID system is running in a degraded mode due to a disk failure and nobody knew.
It …
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