Thanks are directed to the following people:
[Group 1]
Dagmar Galama
Lindsay Wakeman
Ted Neuville
Ed Murphy
Bryan Lavelle
Ivan Hoe
[Group 2]
Ardizzoni Enrico
Jonathan Burelbach
William J Bochnik
Dennis Breeden
John P Speno
Lars Bro
People in group 1 favour TruCluster for its automatic operation plus some
other features. This will come at a cost, of course, for the licenses. Ed
Murphy sent a shortcut pointed to the information for TruCluster if anyone
wants to find out more:
http://www.digital.com/info/SP7079/SP7079PF.PDF
People in group 2 suggest using some form of manipulation on the IP
addresses, ie. when the main server goes down, its IP address is added to
the standby server as an alias. I choose this method for its economic nature
and it should do the job. Particular thanks go to John P Speno for his
detailed advice on a working system with the same operating principle, plus
some tricks of the trade, eg. the mysterious difference between "ifconfig
delete" and "ifconfig -alias".
Finally, John R James Jr mentioned routing and load balancing using a CISCO
or similar product.
Thank you everyone for your quick responses. You people are just amazing.
Regards,
Hung Tran
RLM Systems
Australia
-----Original Message-----
From: Tran, Hung
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2000 5:31 PM
To: 'tru64-unix-managers_at_ornl.gov'
Subject: Main and Standby AlphaServers Sharing Single
IP Address
Hi all,
I have 2 AlphaServers on the network that are supposed to be
a redundant, fail-over pair, ie. only one needs to be up and running at any
time. They have to share one IP address. The objective is to minimise any
downtime as short as possible. I am thinking of 2 options:
1. Have the standby machine configured with the main maching's IP but
powered down. When the main machine has to be shut down, the standby machine
can be powered up with the same IP address.
2. Both are powered up but the standby has its interface turned off
(using ifconfig?). When the time comes, its interface can be switched on
with the same IP as the main one.
Option 1 takes more downtime due to booting time. Option 2
requires configuring IP on the fly without rebooting. I found in the archive
a message from Karen Byrd stating she had a similar problem changing an IP
address dynamically but an ifconfig -a still shows the old address. No
summary was found.
Am I missing any other options? Please help if you know how
to solve this problem.
I also heard that TruCluster can allow 2 machines to share
one IP address when they are both powered up and on the network, ie. they
behave like one machine. Could anyone shed some light on this, please?
Regards,
Hung Tran
RLM Systems
Received on Mon Jun 26 2000 - 01:27:33 NZST