Server Management Tools for your Data Center

Continued from page: 4

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

OpenQRM

OpenQRM provides automatic failover for servers under its control. In fact, you can set up automatic failover from one OpenQRM managing server to another, so there's no single point of failure. The system also supports diskless servers, which lowers cost and rates of failure. It can dynamically adjust the amount of allocated servers according to actual usage and provides high availability for enterprise services and applications. OpenQRM separates running applications from physical servers, thereby allowing flexible use of resources and ease of management. It supports booting of servers from local disk, NAS, iSCSI, etc.

How to use?
To create a new virtual environment of these machines, which we just booted with OpenQRM image, browse to virtual environments. In Tools, click on New Virtual Environment. A window will open where you have to name the virtual environment. Next it will ask you to choose a kernel image.
Click on the Edit Tab. Here, by default, you will see three images. Choose qrm image and provide the Filesystem Image. Click on the add button. By default, there will be two images-small_iscsi and small_nfs, choose the one according to your need. Now you need to design the nodes' hardware profile. For this, specify the RAM amount, number of CPUs and CPU speed for every node. If you are not sure about this, you can just leave it to any values, letting OpenQRM decide those things.

To set the policy for the virtual environment, click on the Provisioning and Policy tab. Here you can define the minimum, maximum and the number of nodes, which the OpenQRM should use during the start. You can also define policy for the maximum load for a node. Now you can also click on High Availability tab to define whether the virtual environment should use Automatic Application Recovery (AAR) or not. Similarly, you can also choose the support for Automatic Hardware Failover (AHF) and the number of minimum resources OpenQRM should use for it.

In application recovery, when an application crashes, it restarts the application in any other available node

After giving all these details, click on 'save changes' and the virtual environment will be created. To start this virtual environment, get to Action drop-down tab and click on 'start'. Once you start the virtual environment, one of your nodes will reboot and will bring up a small linux kernel shipped with OpenQRM.

Now, to check the High Availability feature of OpenQRM, unplug the network cable or just pull the power source from your first node to simulate a failure. In a few seconds, or as configured by you, OpenQRM will detect that it has not received any heartbeats from the assigned node.
Failover will initiate causing OpenQRM to de-assign the node from the virtual environment and assign the remaining idle nodes. This is to show how OpenQRM will automatically keep your applications running.

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