FreeHA

www.bolthole.com/freeha/

Introduction to FreeHA

Overview

FreeHA is a free, portable High Availability demon (the only free one of its kind?)

High Availability is;

(not fault tolerant)

Managing services on two or more nodes of a HA cluster

FreeHA approach

Single demon on each node

Uses standard protocols to communicate (UDP)

Heterogeneous OS, endian-safe protocol

Long-term goal

Stop throwing away money!

Overly costly software, implementing overly complex solutions, for relatively simple functionality

Costly 'consultants' to hand-hold through unfamiliar, complex setup

Keep FreeHA easy to use, and easy to set up, by using common, understood mechanisms

A high-complexity cluster, is not a target

Potential Alternatives

Solaris x86

high-availability.com RSF-1 HA product

Solaris sparc

Veritas Cluster

SunCluster
(supposedly for x86 “in the future” but unclear when)

Linux

Linux-HA – clearly biased, and seems to not be easy, if even possible, to run on Solaris

Development up to present

Initial release was very barebones

Almost no canned scripts

Could use more state communication

Ran on AmigaOS
(How's that for heterogeneous?)

Present Status

FreeHA 0.9.4

Improved documentation

More states communicated

More prewritten service support:

SDS metasets (Shared disk support)

Mounting filesystems

Virtual IP

Better “trvial case” example

New scripts Solaris specific, BUT
patches/scripts for other OS's welcomed

Sample Configuration

Summary

FreeHA is

Low Cost (Free!)

Easy to customize
(Based on simple shellscripts, not weird
meta-language)

Cross-platform (AmigaOS, even!)

Philip Brown

2003-10-25T15:37:20