I was reading a past post regarding a user asking about a AFP cluster. One user reccomemd either creating a SAN, or doing a "cheap and dirty" 1 raid syste, with two servers. Only one server would have the Raid mounted, and if it failed, the other server would mount it and take over AFP with the correct token. How can this be done?
Here is the original forum post I was referencing in case someone was going to maybe help me out.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2474117?start=0&tstart=0
I love this little conversation I am having with myself. MY end goal is to correct an AFP/SMB high availability cluster or syste,.
Basically what I have discovered is the following:
SAN-The SAN system I envisioned is going to cost well into the $35,000 and above range. The problem is the manuals give you examples of systems that still have points of failure (needing 2 metadata ethernet switches and 2 metadata fibre channel controllers.) If you want to build a true high availability system it needs a lot of hardware, which makes me wonder, why even TEASE people with including XSAN knowing it's a whole bag of hurt if set up incorrectly. And on top of that, NO SAN mirroring, therefore if a Backplane fails on a RAID/LUN you are so SOL!!!
Poor Man's System-On the other side of the spectrum I envision building a system containing TWO Mac pro servers handling AFP, but not silmutaneously. Each will has be connecting to a RAID unit using fibre channel, but also only mounted on ONE of the systems and never silmutaneously. Wow seams like a great solution, I could even drop $6,000 for a Fibre channel switch to make it a bit cleaner. BUT wait.... What happened to IP failover in Lion? That's right, it has been removed, silently assassinated in the night without a sound or cry.
Fail over replacement software-My only option was to create a process made up of 3 scripts that fully simulate what heartbeatd and failoverd provided on the previous systems. They check for constant availability and monitor services. When issues are detected they try and repair the issue, then fail over if not successful. Right I am using this with Two servers that do not share the same file pool. They nightly sync so if a fail over occurs, the data is from the night before until we can bring the main server up and sync it.
I would like to incorporate my Poor man's system into my custom fail over software so that the data is relevent from the moment before the fail over.
Thoughts?????????
Fibre Channel AFP Fail over
