03-02-2005
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Last Activity: 21 April 2019, 8:34 PM EDT
Location: Southern California
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Hi Izzy,
I have various levels of experience with Sun Cluster, Veritas Cluster, HACMP (IBM), Red Hat AS clusters, Tru64 clusters, and SuSe clusters.
My personal opinion (please don't turn this into an OS vs. OS string) is Sun is dying and linux is rising. That being said it may still not be time for you to jump ship yet.
Wait until RH releases the Cluster Suite and GFS for RHAS 4.0 then get a copy to play with. RHAS 4.0 includes LVM and has an LVM gui which may make it easier to transition between Veritas terminalogy and Red Hat LVM. Red Hat's LVM is very similar to HP's LVM. RHAS 3.0 has LVM but it only gives you a GUI during the install. This may or may not be a problem for you. After the install it's all command line.
I have a few clusters running OCFS and GFS. My preference from the sysadmin side is for GFS because it too contains some LVM type features that allow you to grow the size of pools dynamically. Both GFS and OCFS were tough to install and configure when they were first released but they have both gotten better. OCFS is actually pretty easy to install and configure at this point. GFS is a little more cumbersome because you have to define the fencing mechanisms, nodes, and pools. Once you figure it out it is not so bad.
The only show stopper type of gotcha I have run into with RHAS clusters, OCFS, and GFS is a bug in GFS where the first 8 characters of the hostname must be unique. This is not fixed as of GFS 6 Update 4 but RH has told me it will be fixed in the next major release (6.1?). The only way I got around this was to rename my machines.
With the Veritas cluster we had a storage compatiblity issue with our HP VA 7410. We switched the storage to a SUN T3 and got around that problem.
Other then those two issues both have been pretty stable. RH will end up being cheaper becuase you don't have to pay for Veritas. The hardware and OS costs probably won't change much from Sun.
We have multiple RHAS clusters from versions 2.1 to 4.0 with 2,3, and 4 nodes. We have several clusters running 9i RAC and 10g ASM on the same machine using ext3, RAW (and ASM managed RAW), OCFS, and GFS without a problem.
Bottom line - RHAS 3.0 was really starting to be a solid production level clustering system. RHAS 4.0 appear to be even better (but I am still waiting for cluster suite and GFS).
If anyone wants working samples of the config files for GFS just post back and I will open a new thread with them.
Thanks,
TioTony