By: Mark Schoonover
It’s 2 AM Saturday and the phone rings. You thought you were going to have a long holiday weekend. You’ve been informed by the NOC that there’s no connection to the database server, and could you come down to see what’s wrong with it. Remote access won’t save you, there’s no response at all from the server. We’ve all been there during our careers, and there’s technology freely available to save your sanity, and allow you to take that long holiday weekend. Creating a MySQL high availability cluster using Distributed Replicated Block Device, DRBD and Heartbeat will save you from heading back to work at 2 AM.
During MySQL Conference 2007, I attended Storage Replication with DRBD: The Next Big Thing in Cluster Storage Management, which was very informative, but it left me asking how do I implement such a system?
In this article, we’re going to go through the entire process of installing, configuring and testing DRBD, Heartbeat and MySQL running in a 2 node cluster environment. This will be a bare bones configuration, best practices and security will take a back seat while we learn how all the different pieces work together.