Application High Availability in Virtual Environments

http://www.redhat.com/summit/sessions/index.html#394

Great discussion around Red Hat’s solutions for clustering, fencing, etc, in virtualized environments.

Fencing is /very/ important for shared resources, especially disk.  In a virtualized world (RHEV, VMWare, etc), fencing tools can reach right into the hypervisor to kill a failed node in a cluster.  Similarly, ILO, RSA, DRAC, etc can be used to kill power to physical servers.  Either way, before another node in a cluster takes over the shared resource, it is *critical* that the other node is killed.  But obviously — this is an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot.  As the presentors just said – “test, test, and test some more” to make sure you fencing parameters align with your deployment.

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