# HA cluster solution for freebsd



## marudov (Aug 20, 2010)

Hello, 

   I was wondering if someone of you can share some experience with FreeBSD HA clusters. What are the best practices and what software can be used to make two servers with shared storage highly available ?


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## olav (Aug 21, 2010)

HAST and CARP


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## marudov (Aug 21, 2010)

Thanks for the reply. As far as I know HAST is used to store data on two physically separated machines and CARP is for IP sharing between two nodes. That is not what I am looking for. I would like to know if there is something like Service Guard, Sun Cluster, or HACMP that works on FreeBSD. In other words: when one node fails, the applications running on it to start automatically on the fail over node.


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## Galactic_Dominator (Aug 21, 2010)

> As far as I know



Perhaps you could look into it?  Doesn't seem like much use to ask a question and dismiss the answer on assumptions when you have no good reason for those assumptions.  ucarp does exactly what you are talking(see ucarp_up.sh and ucarp_down.sh) about and many people need HA storage as well which is HAST.  Heartbeat is also available and possibly others.


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## marudov (Aug 21, 2010)

Thanks Galactic. I suppose I was wrong with my assumptions. I will take a deeper look and see if carp and hast can suite my needs. However, probably instead of making remarks, you can just point me to some docs to read and share some experience. I think that this is what this forum is all about.


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## phoenix (Aug 21, 2010)

(Shameless plug) Start here and read the blog postings listed there.


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## dennylin93 (Aug 22, 2010)

There's also another page here: HAST.


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## da1 (Aug 23, 2010)

AFAIK, there is no such thing like HACMP on FreeBSD. would be sweet to have something tho. I remember I was searching for a solution too but couldn't find one.


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## AndyUKG (Sep 2, 2010)

I'm not aware of any direct equivalents of HA clustering that runs on FreeBSD either.
The HAST/CARP solution may work for you, but while having the advantage of not requiring dual attached (often expensive fibre channel) storage from reading about this seems to have the disadvantages of degraded disk IO because we are replicating all disk updates via TCP/IP. If you can test the IO performance and its sufficient then it seems a neat solution.
Otherwise you might have to look at Linux and LinuxHA (or Veritas cluster if you can pay).

Id be interested to know of anyone actually usuing HAST and CARP for this type of configuration. Is this reliable under FreeBSD? What about network issues, I imagine both HAST nodes could try and run as masters where network connectivity is down between them, what happens when network connectivity is re-established? Thats something HA solutions typically deal with in one way or another (ie via multiple redundant network heartbeats and SCSI fencing etc).

thanks Andy.


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## phoenix (Sep 3, 2010)

Once our fibre link between our two datacentres is lit, we'll be using a CARP+HAST+ZFS setup for our backup servers, and for our storage server layer in our virtual infrastructure.

In testing using VirtualBox, it works nicely.  However, we haven't done any performance testing for raw I/O throughput.


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## dkt (Jul 27, 2014)

There is a commercial product called RSF-1. Since it is a closed source product, I haven't tried it.


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