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ShaoLin HA Cluster is a software to manage and control the system and application availability of servers. The goal is to increase the availability of your application in the event of a failure. By using redundant hardware, and software control technique, it is possible to make standard PC-based Linux servers to able to failover one another in case of a failure occurred. This technology is targeted for business application servers, file servers and all sorts of ebusiness services, which needs continuous operations in a high service level. The ShaoLin HA Cluster is a low cost cluster software solution comparing to other specialized hardware-based fault-tolerance redundancy machines. Since it is a software software, it is considerably more robust, lower cost, and can handle application level failures.
In the past, the implementation of a high availability solution often requires special skills or well trained system administrators to operate. Since clustering of traditional PC hardware voids the overall behavior of system administration and system configuration. This complexity often fears users to implement clustering solutions due to a high total cost of ownership. Using cluster technologies immediately adds at least one more server to administer, and that server often requires extensive care to operate. ShaoLin HA Cluster overcome this issue by using a system image clustering rather than individual application+data clustering. Instead of defining storage and application relations, we define OS image as an independent resource. With the technique of using a shared disk storage and without the need of a local disk, the complete system image can be shared among the clusters. This ensures a transparent system image living in the shared disk. This transparent design does not voids the behavior of a traditional stand alone server, and able to have features like failure detection for application and hardware, together with recovery ability.
ShaoLin HA Cluster support custom application monitor and recovery by user defined failover and application control policies, together it supports extended monitoring and application recovery for common standard applications using Service Monitoring Agents(SMA). SMAs allow precise efficient application availability control and monitor with vendor level certification. The use of SMA can maximize the availability of the target application and thus minimize unplanned downtime.
Figure 1-1. Example ShaoLin HA Cluster setup
Two node clustering with heartbeat communication and system image stored in shared storage
The system image oriented design of the ShaoLin HA Cluster, enables system recovery without the need of specific application configurations and porting. The extra cluster server is also diskless which requires zero administration on software and configurations. The operation of the clusters in the ShaoLin HA Cluster environment works transparently like a traditional Linux server. This system image oriented design eliminates the extra administration work of the additional cluster server and the need of intensive extra training to system administrators. ShaoLin HA Cluster is the most user friendly and is a cluster software solution that has the lowest total cost of ownership.
ShaoLin HA Cluster is a Linux distribution independent software. This means it will work on different Linux distribution. For a list of certified and tested Linux distribution, please see the ShaoLin HA Cluster 1.0 release notes for the latest information. ShaoLin HA Cluster doesn't require to patch your software or modify any binaries. This will not void any hardware and software incompatibility in terms of certification on the original Linux operating system.
