Michael,

I would suggest looking at all the currect load balancing, fail-over, and high availability (in order of complexity) articles that are available on the internet explaining how they built their cluster and the basics of clusters. Find solutions that could work for you and implement them with your FreeBSD platform. There really isn't a "here's a FreeBSD fail-over cluster solution", because it is usually a custom environment like the setup below though you might find some tools that have been ported to FreeBSD to help you get to where you want to be.

One of the biggest issues to overcome is data integrity and consistency. You can't have two machines trying to update the same data at once.

You can set this up now with shared SCSI, but I am planning on setting up something like this when a decent synchronous network file system is available:

Two machines, each running seperately with its own active users and applications, each having local access to a mirror of the other machines data. When online machine notices offline machine has been down for n minute(s) it will mount the local mirror, bring up virtual interfaces, and start all processes with their configurations. The offline machine would ideally also have "shutdown" procedures in the event that the outage was network related. A recover procedure would involve updating then mounting the local mirror on the offline machine, killing the processes on the online machine, removing/creating virtual interfaces, and starting the processes on the recovered machine.

Chuck

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message