February 4, 2015 By Severalnines Check Out Our Latest Technical Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Like every month, we have created new content and tools for you; here is a summary of what we’ve published. Please do check it out and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.

New Live Technical Webinars

A DevOps Guide to Database Infrastructure Automation for eCommerce

Tuesday, February 17th

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Automation is a worthwhile investment for retailers serious about eCommerce, but deciding on which …

January 27, 2015 By Severalnines

Unlike standard MySQL server and MySQL Cluster, the way to start a MySQL/MariaDB Galera Cluster is a bit different. Galera requires you to start a node in a cluster as a reference point, before the remaining nodes are able to join and form the cluster. This process is known as cluster bootstrap. Bootstrapping is an initial step to introduce a database node as primary component, before others see it as a reference point to sync up data.

How does it work?

When Galera starts with the bootstrap command on a node, that particular node will reach Primary state (check the value of wsrep_cluster_status). The remaining nodes will just require a normal start command and they will automatically look for existing Primary Component (PC) in the cluster and join to form a cluster. Data synchronization then happens through either incremental state transfer (IST) or …

Apache CloudStack is a turnkey orchestration platform to deliver IaaS clouds. As a cloud infrastructure scales to hundreds or thousands of servers, with production environments supporting multiple applications and services, high availability becomes a key requirement. Just as for OpenStack, it is possible to deploy the CloudStack management server in a multi-node installation. Since the management server uses a MySQL database to store the state of all its objects, the database could become a single point of failure. The CloudStack manual recommends MySQL replication with manual failover in the event of database loss. We believe there is a better way.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to deploy redundant CloudStack management servers with …

MySQL 5.6 has an extensive list of new features and changes, so upgrading from a previous version can be risky if not tested extensively. For this reason, we recommend our users to read and understand the changes before doing the upgrade. If you are on older MySQL versions, it is probably time to think about upgrading. MySQL 5.6 was released in February 2013, that’s almost two years ago!

A major upgrade, e.g., from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 or MariaDB 5.5 to 10, requires the former MySQL/MariaDB server related packages to be uninstalled. In Galera Cluster, there are two ways to upgrade; either by performing offline upgrade (safer, simpler, requires service downtime) or online upgrade (more complex, no downtime). 

In this blog post, we are going to show you how to perform an offline upgrade on Galera-based …

January 5, 2015 By Severalnines

Cloud storage is hot. Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive all offer cloud sharing platforms where you can store documents in the cloud and access them from all your devices. For enterprises who require full control, ownCloud is an open source solution that allows files to be stored on-premises and/or a backend cloud. 

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to deploy a high availability setup using ownCloud Community Edition. We will need to set up redundancy in each of the following layers:

• file storage
• web server
• database server
• load balancer

We will use five servers. ownCloud will run on three separate servers with MySQL Galera Cluster 5.6 and GlusterFS running on RHEL 6.5 64bit. ownCloud supports GlusterFS as primary storage. ClusterControl will be co-located …

Check Out Our Latest Technical Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Like every month this year, we have created new content and tools for you; here is a summary of what we’ve published this December. Please do check it out and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.

And thank you for following us in the past 12 months and for your fidelity; we look forward to “seeing” you next year as well and wish you a great start to 2015!

New Live Technical Webinars

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce …

If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

For an online shop, the website is the cash register. It has to be open for business 24 hours a day.

As the ops person on duty, when you get a call at 3am after your website went down, your priority number one is to restore the service asap. But why can we not have our application stack automatically recover, and not have the pager wake us at all? Why do we still stick to tedious manual processes, which take up time and resources, and hinder future growth?

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce properties. Automation is a worthwhile investment for retailers serious about eCommerce, but deciding on which tools to invest in can be a confusing and overwhelming process.

Join us for this webinar to understand the key pain points that online retailers experience which indicate it’s time …

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in last week’s webinar on 'Galera Cluster for MySQL vs MySQL (NDB) Cluster: A High Level Comparison'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines VP of Products, Alex Yu, who was part of the team at Ericsson who originally developed the NDB storage engine in 2001, gave an overview of the two clustering architectures and discussed their respective strengths and weaknesses: 

1. MySQL Cluster architecture: strengths and limitations
2. Galera Architecture: strengths and limitations
3. Deployment scenarios
4. Data migration
5. Read and write workloads (Optimistic/pessimistic locking)
6. WAN/Geographical replication
7. Schema changes
8. Management and monitoring …

December 8, 2014 By Severalnines

Percona XtraBackup is a great backup tool with lots of nice features to make online and consistent backups, although the variety of options can be a bit overwhelming. s9s_backup tries to make it simpler for users, it creates an easy to use interface for XtraBackup features such as full backups, incremental backups, streaming/non-streaming, and parallel compression.

Backups are organized into backup sets, consisting of a full backup and zero or more incremental backups. s9s_backup manages the LSNs (Log Sequence Number) of the XtraBackups. The backup set can then be restored as one single unit using just one command.

In earlier posts, we covered various ways on restoring your backup files …