We’ve covered setting  up a two node failover cluster in Windows Server 2008 and now that we have that running we can start to cluster some services and/or applications.  In this example we’ll cluster File Services to create a highly available file share.  To start we can simply right-click Services and Application under the cluster and choose Configure a Service or Application.
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If you have ever set up a Windows cluster in Windows 2003, 2000 or if you were brave enough NT4 you know it has always posed a number of challenges that usually required some specialized skills.  Well in Windows Server 2008 that has changed thankfully and we can whip together a two node failover cluster in minutes!  Before you get started you will need the following:

1. 3 servers at minimum (1DC, 2 Nodes)
2. Shared storage (iSCSI or FibreChannel)
3. 3 Networks (Public, iSCSI, Heartbeat)

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A. Overview

This guide attempts to provide a Xen based test environment where you can practice setting up a two node cluster (cluster setup itself is not discussed here – I’m merely giving you what you need to set it up).

XEN can host two type of guest systems para-virtualized and fully-virtualized:

• for para-virtualized guests you require the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 installation tree available over NFS, FTP or HTTP.
• for fully-virtualized guest installations you will require DVD or CD-ROM distribution media or a bootable .iso file and a network accessible installation tree

For details, please refer to the RHEL5 Virtualization Manual.

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This guide shows how you can set up a two node, high-availability HTTP cluster with heartbeat on CentOS. Both nodes use the Apache web server to serve the same content.
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This tutorial is based on Falko Timme’s tutorial for MySQL Cluster 5.0. It shows how to configure a MySQL 5.1 cluster with five nodes: 1 x management, 2 x storage nodes and 2 x balancer nodes. This cluster is load-balanced by an Ultra Monkey package which provides heartbeat (for checking if the other node is still alive) and ldirectord (to split up the requests to the nodes of the MySQL cluster).

In this document I use Debian Etch 4.0 for all nodes. Therefore the setup might differ a bit for other distributions. The two data nodes were x64 to use all of the 8GB RAM. Servers were compiled from source so you should be able to make it running on any platform. The MySQL version I use in this setup is 5.1.24-rc. It’s a release candidate, but I wanted to use 5.1 to take advantage of Memory-Disk Based tables.

Beginning with MySQL 5.1.6, it is possible to store the non-indexed columns of NDB tables on disk, rather than in RAM as with previous versions of MySQL Cluster.[More here]

This howto is just a scratch to make it running, for many of you I am suggesting to read some off docs from MySQL page to be prepared to how manage the whole cluster and always know whats going on.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! Bare in mind you need to make tests and prepare your databases before using it in production mode.
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