[ha-clusters-discuss] cluster-related open source packages in OpenSolaris?

[Richard Elling]

Narayan Venkat wrote:
> At the risk of starting a religious debate, How about Linux-HA and it's associated components (heartbeat, DRBD, STONITH, ...)? 
>
> BTW, how does Linux-HA compare to Sun Cluster?
>   

In general, it is a waste of time to do a feature-to-feature comparison.
The reason is that trade-offs made to improve one aspect of the
cluster behaviour often negatively impact other aspects.  For example,
if you optimize for fast failure detection, you often compromise on
stability or recovery.

A better approach is to look at benchmarks.  Later this month, you
should see a new book on Dependability Benchmarks published
by Wiley (IEEE Press) which has a chapter on benchmarking HA
clusters.  We hope that people will help us to further develop such
benchmarks so that we can improve the technology.  If you can't
measure it, it is hard to improve!
 -- richard