CentOS 7 and HA

First some background…

One of the many lessons I’ve learnt from my Linux HA / Storage clustering project is that the Debian HA ecosystem is essentially broken, We reached the point where packages were too old, too buggy or in Debian 8’s case - outright missing.

In the past I was very disappointed with RHEL/CentOS 5 / 6 and (until now) have been quite satisfied with Debian as a stable server distribution with historicity more modern packages and kernels.

I feel that CentOS / RHEL 7 has changed the game.*

(When combined with ElRepo or EPEL that provide wide array of modern packages)

It is simply light years ahead of it’s predecessor, resolves a lot of the issues we’ve had with Debian Jessie and after thorough testing of Debian 7,8 Centos 6,7 I have decided to employ CentOS 7 as the base OS for the storage cluster. CentOS / RHEL 7 are missing a few critical packages in the cluster HA space

  1. The available pacemaker package was built without --with-stonith. This means there is no support for legacy STONITH plugins, many of these are heavily relied upon and do not have replacements in the new plugin system.

  2. cluster-glue is missing / has been deprecated. The cluster-glue package provides a lot of very useful resource agents / plugins which again, are missing from the new pacemaker builds.

  3. crmsh is no longer available and has been replaced by pcs. pcs is great, but lots of very useful tools still use crmsh including the puppet-corosync module which is fantastic for bootstrapping clusters.

I have recompiled CentOS 7’s pacemaker package changing only one thing - I added --with-stonith to the rpmbuild command.

OpenSUSE provides the cluster-glue and cluster-glue-libs from their CentOS 7 repository

OpenSUSE also provides crmsh from their [CentOS 7 repository]((http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/ha-clustering:/Stable/CentOS_CentOS-7/ )

Obviously the best solution however have a feeling that it will take some time for all the maintainers of the existing STONITH / fencing agent developers to port their code to the new framework.

I have been logging requests to various third party RHEL repos asking if they would the missing packages.

If they don’t feel they have the resources or want to add them in for whatever reason, I will continue to host the packages myself on Packagecloud and likely somewhere else as a fall-back.

Last updated: Tue Jul  7 11:59:25 2015
Last change: Tue Jul  7 10:57:16 2015
Stack: corosync
Current DC: s1-san5 (1) - partition with quorum
Version: 1.1.12-a14efad
2 Nodes configured
16 Resources configured


Online: [ s1-san5 s1-san6 ]

 Clone Set: ping_gateway-clone [ping_gateway]
     Started: [ s1-san5 s1-san6 ]
 Master/Slave Set: ms_drbd_r0 [drbd_r0]
     Masters: [ s1-san5 ]
     Slaves: [ s1-san6 ]
 ip_r0  (ocf::heartbeat:IPaddr2): Started s1-san5
 iscsi_target_r0  (ocf::heartbeat:iSCSITarget): Started s1-san5
 iscsi_lun_r0 (ocf::heartbeat:iSCSILogicalUnit):  Started s1-san5
 stonith_s1-san5  (stonith:rcd_serial): Started s1-san6
 stonith_s1-san6  (stonith:rcd_serial): Started s1-san5
 Master/Slave Set: ms_drbd_r1 [drbd_r1]
     Masters: [ s1-san5 ]
     Slaves: [ s1-san6 ]
 ip_r1  (ocf::heartbeat:IPaddr2): Started s1-san5
 iscsi_target_r1  (ocf::heartbeat:iSCSITarget): Started s1-san5
 iscsi_lun_r1 (ocf::heartbeat:iSCSILogicalUnit):  Started s1-san5
 iscsi_conf_r1  (ocf::heartbeat:anything):  Started s1-san5
 iscsi_conf_r0  (ocf::heartbeat:anything):  Started s1-san5

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