MySQL Cluster is, without doubt, the most interesting MySQL product Oracle offers to the people out there. It’s the flagship, the holy grail, based on the knowledge and technology developed doing our well known MySQL Server. I’m not going to go through why MySQL Cluster is so great, that you can find anywhere. I’m going [...]

HA Provided by OVM

A new white paper is available that steps you though the benefits and the use of the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition (also see yesterday’s press announcement). Get the white paper here.

As a reminder Oracle Virtual Manager provides a way to add High Availability to your MySQL deployment (this is separate from MySQL Replication and MySQL Cluster). The new OVM template provides a very convenient way to create one or more Virtual Machines that come pre-provisioned with OVM, Oracle Linux and MySQL Enterprise Edition as well as the scripts required to integrate MySQL …

Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition

Oracle today announced the release of the “Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition” – you can read the press-release here.

There are a couple of ways to look at the benefits:

• Provides a simple alternate High Availability solution for MySQL (i.e. rather than MySQL Replication or MySQL Cluster – although you can still set up replication to/from a MySQL Server installed this way)
• A new, very simple way to get up and running with MySQL Enterprise – running on a complete stack that Oracle can provide support for

As the focus of this blog is normally MySQL Cluster and Replication, the HA attributes of this solution are probably those …

Interesting question on human mistakes was posted on the DBA Managers Forum discussions today.

As human beings, we are sometimes make mistakes. How do you make sure that your employees won’t make mistakes and cause downtime/data loss/etc on your critical production systems?

I don’t think we can avoid this technically, probably working procedures is the solution.
I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I typed my thoughts and as I was finishing, I thought that it makes sense to post it on the blog too so here we go…

The keys to prevent mistakes are low stress levels, clear communications and established processes. Not a complete list but I think these are the top things to reduce the number of mistakes we make managing data infrastructure or for that matter working in any critical environment be it IT administration, …

Overview MySQL Replication is one of the most used and valued features of the MySQL Server. Unlike some other products on the market, it’s out-of-the-box, easy to configure, non-paid and smart features. Most of our medium/large/super-large installation base are using replication to achieve “scale-out” scaling. Some will use it for backup purposes (not as HA [...]

When I read on the internetz that Alex Davies was about the publish a Packt book on MySQL HA I pinged my contacts at Packt and suggested that I'd review the book .

I've ran into Alex at some UKUUG conferences before and he's got a solid background on MySQL Cluster and other HA alternatives so I was looking forward to reading the book.

Alex starts of with a couple of indepth chapters on MySQL Cluster, he does mention that it's not a fit for all problems, but I'd hoped he did it a bit more prominently ... an upfront chapter outlining the different approaches and when which approach is a match could have been better. The avid reader now might be 80 pages into MySQL cluster before he realizes it's not going to be a match for his problem.

I really loved …

This is one of a few MySQL High Availability strategies.  I have used this for years and found it work great.  If you don’t know about DRBD and MySQL you should read Peter’s comments.

These are step by step instructions for Redhat 5 or CentOS.

If you need more details please refer to:
http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/

Configuring MySQL for DRBD
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/ha-drbd-install-mysql.html

Getting started:

The OS in this example is CentOS 5.5.  I added a new disk (/dev/sde) to the four disk RAID-5 and RAID-1 I was already using.   I’m only creating an 8 …

For those who've seen my presentation on MySQL HA, you already know that I often use a multimaster setup with a meta OCF resource that groups my favoured MySQL instance with the service ip , using a meta resource means that pacemaker monitors mysql, but it doesn't actually manage it. It's an approach that works for us.

One of the other approaches I will be looking at soon is the freshly released OCF resource that Florian announced last week.

Back in the days our approach meant we didn't have to use clone resources, which you might remember being pretty buggy in the v2 era, not wanting to use clons resources isn't really a valid reason anymore these days . I've also frequently mentioned the combination of using DRBD and MultiMaster replication, using this set of OCF resource makes that a lot more easy ..

…

So about 4 monts ago there was the crazy idea to start a new FOSS event in Belgium targeted at sysadmins.

What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

We had a book raffle where …

Last week I was in Manchester for the 2010 UKUUG Spring Conference, right .. make that 2 weeks ago , :)

The UKUUG usually hosts the more interesting conferences around ... , it's not just the schedule that attrackts me , yes there's the strong focus towards Larger Scale Unix (and mostly Linux) deployments and how to manage them, but there's also the opportunity to chat in real life with the Devops from across the chunnel.

Spending time with R.I.Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Simon Wilkinson , Alex Davies , Simon Riggs , Josette, and many others is always fun .

As I …