 Configuring Red Hat's High-Availability Server
Rafeeq Ur Rehman
This is a 24x7 world, and many businesses need around-the-clock,
reliable processing of data. Many UNIX vendors provide high-availability
systems for their machines. With a gradual market shift towards
Linux, demand for Linux-based, high-availability solutions has also
increased. This article takes a quick look at how to configure the
Red Hat High-Availability Server, which runs with Red Hat Linux
6.2 and provides a failover clustering and load balancing solution.
There have been many definitions for the term high availability
(HA). For simplicity, high availability is a solution that minimizes
downtime for a system. High availability can be achieved in many
ways, including fault tolerance and computer clustering. To achieve
high availability, computer clusters are usually used in a failover
server (FOS) configuration where one computer (the backup or failover
server) backs up another one (the primary server). The primary server
provides some service to end users in normal circumstances.
All servers in a failover cluster use two type of network addresses.
Private, or heartbeat, addresses are used to monitor each other;
public addresses are used for end users. Initially, all public addresses
are configured on the primary server.
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