Hi,

I am training to become a Linux administrator. someone has advised me that a Linux Cluster is one of the best way to backup Redhat. is this true?

Could you also tell me how to setup a linux cluster? is Heartbeat/Ultra monkey the way forward? i have been looking on the internet for a week to try and find instructions on how to set up a decent cluster but i have had no joy.

please help!

Regards and thanks,

Max

No idea why you'd associate a cluster with backups, are you sure that's what they meant?? Clustering can take many forms, as it's a fairly vague term. Heartbeats wouldn't be clustering in it's purest form, that'd be more something like a Beowulf cluster where the machines are collectively processing work in a distributed fashion. Heartbeats and Ultramonkey are for HA, so you do have multiple machines providing a single service, so will often be called a cluster still, but in a very different way. Best starting point for the HA side would probably be linuxha.org but this isn't a beginners guide thing, you'd normally be a very competent sysadmin before you'd go anywhere near Linux based HA. Within enterprise it's often much more common to use a separate device like an F5 LTM to provide this functionality, generally making it the network guys job, not the sysadmin.

Hi,

Follow the Below Link It might help you to understand the Cluster basics.

http://www.redhat.com/cluster_suite/

Thanks,

Mahi

I think I made the same mistake you did for a minute, I have noticed on re-reading the word "data" was never mentioned, they might have meant a "fail-over cluster" which is a way to ensure services keep running when a physical machine fails, in laymens terms of the word backup, rather then the technical, data back-up we generally associate with.

Ahh yes I see that. Yeah, as an HA standby, not a backup of data.

Hi,

I think he was referring to a "fail-over cluster".

So i am assuming a Beowulf cluster be the best thing for a fail-over cluster?

No, that's more for scalable parallel processing. not fail safe web servers. we've still no idea what sort of topology you're really after, but linuxha.org would be the place to start off.