Installing MySQL on CentOS 6.2 with PaceMaker, MHA and more

When I work with High Availability software, I’m reminded of the maze in the original computer adventure game “You are Lost in a maze of twisty-turny passages all alike…”.

If you search the web for HA programs you will find many well maintained projects all related that refer each other. The goal of this document is to give you with a step by step guide to a production worthy MySQL system. It should provide at least 99.999% access to your data and be able to scale read requests as you grow.

I have chosen these programs and utilities because they are free (as in beer) and each has enterprise support available. (When you make the money to pay for it.) If you start with this MySQL platform you will avoid many common problems. Just write your application to read and write data from different servers.

Here is what we’ll be …

I’m speaking at Percona Live, LinuxCon Europe, and linux.conf.au. And I just co-founded a new company.

I have a few busy weeks behind me, and even busier weeks ahead. If you’ve been wondering why recently I haven’t been updating this space too frequently, here’s why:

Yours truly and fellow ex-Linbiters Martin Loschwitz and Andreas Kurz have recently founded hastexo, an independent professional services organization focused on open-source high availability and disaster recovery. We are already offering both on-site and …

PART 1 – This will be a multi part post.

THIS DOCUMENT IS BEING UPDATED – PLEASE WATCH FOR CHANGES!

After years of supporting MySQL, for many different companies, I’ve seen this story played out again and again.
The company:

• chooses a Database Management System (MySQL)
• installs the DBMS on a computer with other processes
• writes many programs to access the data (Without concern on how the queries are written.)
• moves DBMS to a computer of its own and writes more programs
• buy bigger computer to run the DBMS and writes more programs
• tires of DBMS response times and outages caused by developers working on production systems and hires a Database Administrator to fix the mess

This is a step by step description of  how I build a highly available, production MySQL servers. Like most things it life, these problems …

I wrote this up a while ago and decided that I didn’t want to lose it in a shuffle of documents during my transition to a new workstation. It’s the basics of setting up Heartbeat (LVS) + DRBD (block replication between active/passive master servers) + MySQL. This should give you the basics of a H/A system without the benefits of SAN but also without the associated cost. The validity of this setup for H/A purposes is highly dependent on your workload and environment. You should know the ins and outs of your H/A solution before deciding to blame the system for not performing as expected. As with all production systems you should test, test, test and test some more before going live.

When I get around to it later I’ll post my How-To for setting up RHCS + SAN + MySQL. You can download the DRBD document PDF here: …

Last week, the Linux-HA project made its Heartbeat 3.0.4 and Cluster Glue 1.0.7 release, and Pacemaker released 1.0.10 a few weeks back. Thanks to the amazing Simon Horman (horms to IRC regulars), those releases have been uploaded to Debian unstable (sid) yesterday.

What’s sid?

sid is the permanent code name of the Debian unstable distribution. It’s where package maintainers upload fresh builds and maintain the latest versions of distribution packages. It’s not meant for general consumption, …

I’ve just announced a rather large update to the Linux-HA documentation.

We now finally have a Developer’s Guide for OCF resource agent authors and contributors. If you want to write a new resource agent to bundle with your project, or plan to send a patch for an existing resource agent, then this guide is for you.

In addition, we’ve released a new version of the Linux HA User’s Guide, which is the definitive reference and handbook for Heartbeat users.

PDF versions of these are, as always, …

One more DRBD tutorial, this time I will describe howto setup MySQL with DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device). Purpose This document describes how to to setup a failover system with MySQL and DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device). Introduction In this tutorial we will setup two Debian Linux nodes with a DRBD volume. MySQL will be [...]

When I read on the internetz that Alex Davies was about the publish a Packt book on MySQL HA I pinged my contacts at Packt and suggested that I'd review the book .

I've ran into Alex at some UKUUG conferences before and he's got a solid background on MySQL Cluster and other HA alternatives so I was looking forward to reading the book.

Alex starts of with a couple of indepth chapters on MySQL Cluster, he does mention that it's not a fit for all problems, but I'd hoped he did it a bit more prominently ... an upfront chapter outlining the different approaches and when which approach is a match could have been better. The avid reader now might be 80 pages into MySQL cluster before he realizes it's not going to be a match for his problem.

I really loved …

This year’s Linux Plumbers Conference is taking place November 3-5, in Cambridge, MA, United States. The CfP is already closed and the program is due any day now, but the co-located miniconference on high availability clustering is still accepting proposals. This is your chance to get involved!

So if you plan to attend Plumbers or just happen to be in the area, please submit your talk! Miniconference talks are not expected to be full-blown presentations. Instead, you can float an …

This is one of a few MySQL High Availability strategies.  I have used this for years and found it work great.  If you don’t know about DRBD and MySQL you should read Peter’s comments.

These are step by step instructions for Redhat 5 or CentOS.

If you need more details please refer to:
http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/

Configuring MySQL for DRBD
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/ha-drbd-install-mysql.html

Getting started:

The OS in this example is CentOS 5.5.  I added a new disk (/dev/sde) to the four disk RAID-5 and RAID-1 I was already using.   I’m only creating an 8 …