MHA (Master High Availability Manager and tools for MySQL) is one of the most important pieces of our managed services. When properly set up, it can check replication health, move writer and reader virtual IPs, perform failovers, and have its output constantly monitored by Nagios. Is it easy to deploy and follows the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy that I love so much.

This blog post is a quick start guide to try it out and play with it in your own testing environment. I assume that you already know how to install software, deal with SSH keys and setup replication in MySQL. The post just covers MHA configuration.

Testing environment

Taken from /etc/hosts

192.168.1.116      mysql-server1
192.168.1.117   mysql-server2
192.168.1.118   mysql-server3
192.168.1.119   mha-manager

mysql-server1: Our master MySQL …