Heartbeat 3.0.2 released

After a long release hiatus, an elaborate project re-organization, and with a new primary project sponsor, the Heartbeat cluster messaging layer saw its 3.0.2 release earlier today.

Heartbeat 3.0.2 is the first official Heartbeat release since 2.1.3, released over 2 years ago. There have been a number of intermediate releases in the interim, including some Fedora releases labeled 3.0.0 and 3.0.1, but this is the first official Heartbeat 3.0 release. This means that Pacemaker, the definitive Linux cluster stack, continues to be fully supported on both the Heartbeat and Corosync/OpenAIS messaging layers.

The release tarball may be downloaded directly from the Mercurial repository, or from the Linux-HA web site. Debian packages will soon be available from Martin Loschwitz’ people.debian.org repository and are expected to make their way into Squeeze shortly.

And yes, we had planned to make this release in January. But 2/1/2010 just looked so neat as a release date.

Liveblog: LINBIT at Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2009

Today (Saturday 3/14) and tomorrow (Sunday 3/15) Martin Loschwitz and myself are presenting open source high availability at Chemnitzer Linuxtage in Chemnitz, Germany. As I am blogging this, Martin is speaking to a packed auditorium of about 200-or-so attendees (I’m terrible at estimating crowds).

Got DRBD? Got Dolphin? Combine ’em!

Today we announced (German press release, English press release) a partner deal with Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, makers of the Dolphin Express highspeed interconnect technology. Like DRBD, Dolphin Express and Dolphin SuperSockets are well established within the MySQL customer base — the latter as a low-latency interconnect for MySQL Cluster. As part of the deal, DRBD will soon be available in a version supporting SuperSockets — which means you’ll be able to use Dolphin Express cards as a drop-in replacement for the Gigabit Ethernet cards you now typically run DRBD replication over. And you’ll be able to use Dolphin Express for MySQL High Availability in applications where MySQL Cluster is not the ideal choice, too.

When not to use DRBD

Now you may not believe me, but there actually are situations when DRBD is not the right choice for meeting your storage needs. Since I’ve been asked to compile some of these and present them here, let’s take a look.

Don’t use DRBD when…

Performance tuning DRBD setups

These days, we seem to be getting a lot of inquiries from new or would-be DRBD adopters, especially MySQL and PostgreSQL DBAs wanting to add high availability to their master database servers. And these, unsurprisingly, turn out to be two of their most popular questions:

How will using DRBD affect my write performance?

… and …

What are DRBD’s most important tunables with regard to write performance?

Let’s take a look at both of these issues. Ready? Let’s go.