Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Sep 22, 2009
Mike Hogan, CEO of ScaleDB spoke at the Boston MySQL User Group in September 2009:
ScaleDB is a storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering. It has been described as the Oracle RAC of MySQL. Using ScaleDB, you can scale your cluster by simply adding nodes, without partitioning your data. Each node has full read/write capability, eliminating the need for slaves, while delivering cluster-level load balancing. ScaleDB is looking for additional beta testers, there is a sign up at http://www.scaledb.com.
Slides are online (and downloadable) at http://www.slideshare.net/Sheeri/scale-db-preso-for-boston-my-sql-meetup-92009
Watch the video online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emu2WfNx4KA or directly embedded here:
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Mar 25, 2009
This topic has been raised again and again and quite a few people have asked me how to configure RAC on VMware Fusions on Mac. This warrants a blog post, especially, that Mac is definitely the way to go for an Oracle DBA — a Unix desktop OS that just works. What can be better? Sorry, I digress without even starting!
Before I go any further, I should say that this is not a complete guide on the Oracle RAC install with VMware Fusion but just the hints on setting up shared storage for Oracle RAC using Mac as host for VMWare Fusion virtual machines (VM’s). The reader is assumed to understand how to setup Oracle RAC and has general understanding of VMware itself. There are plenty of guides on the Internet on how to setup Oracle RAC including VMware but they usually refer to VMware Server on Linux or Windows. Please note that I’m writing it largely by memory so if you hit any issue — please leave a comment.
Disclaimers are over — moving on!
The root of the problem is that VMware Fusion doesn’t support shared disks unlike VMware Server on Windows and Linux. If you try to update the .vmx file manually to enable shared disk, you get the error message “Clustering is not supported for VMware Fusion – this setting will be ignored”. Fear not — you are running the best desktop OS anyway! ;-)
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Posted by Edwin Sarmiento on Feb 20, 2009
In Part 1 of this series, we prepared our Windows Server 2008 servers to be a part of a cluster. Part 2 showed us how we can add the shared disks, install the Failover Cluster Feature, and run the Validate Cluster Configuration Wizard. In this post, we will complete the process by creating a Windows Server 2008 cluster.
Creating the Windows Server 2008 cluster
Once you have managed to install the Failover Cluster Feature on both nodes, you can run the Failover Cluster Management console on either of the nodes. To do so:
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Posted by Edwin Sarmiento on Feb 9, 2009
In Part 1 of this series, we prepared our Windows Server 2008 servers to be a part of a cluster. In this part, we will look at adding the iSCSI disks to the servers. The series of steps outlined below should be done on both nodes.
Before we go any further, I must mention that you should have at least two network cards configured on both of the servers, where one NIC is connected to the local area network, and the other to the other server and is private. This second NIC will be considered your heartbeat, where communication between nodes will travel. This is basic when configuring any cluster nodes. How these cards are configured will come into the picture as we go along in the process.
1. Add the iSCSI Targets as disks on the server nodes
Windows Server 2008 comes with iSCSI Initiator software that enables connection of a Windows host to an external iSCSI storage array using network adapters. This differs from previous versions of Microsoft Windows where you need to download and install this software prior to connecting to an iSCSI storage. You can launch the tool from Administrative Tools and select iSCSI Initiator.
To connect to the iSCSI target: Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Keith Murphy on Sep 23, 2008
If you track the database world outside of MySQL, you know that Oracle is having a conference this week. It’s called Oracle Open World. Drips with irony doesn’t it? But this post isn’t about Oracle being open or otherwise.
This post is about the announcement being made Wednesday. It seems Oracle has a surprise. A pretty well kept surprise. It’s such a big deal that Larry Ellison himself is making the announcement.
Some people, including some of my colleagues at Pythian, are speculating that this is going to be an announcement about a share-nothing clustering solution.
In the first quarter of 2007, I interviewed with a company in Atlanta, seeking my first full-time job as a MySQL database administrator. They were an online company building a social-networking website with a virtual world interface (kind of like Second Life, from what I understood). They were using an (at the time) fairly unstable version of MySQL 5.1 only because it offered clustering with the ability to store data on disk while keeping the indexes in memory. Previously, in version 5.0, everything had to be stored in-memory. Much has improved with MySQL clustering since that time.
While I don’t know for certain that Larry is going to announce in-memory clustering, I kind of hope that is what it’s all about, because it would demonstrate this: Oracle is walking a trail blazed by MySQL.
