So I was chatting with fellow MVP Allan Hirt (b|t) about the cluster build that I wrote about yesterday, and I had a few more realizations about the Linux HA process as it stands right now. I haven’t talked to the the Linux product team at Microsoft about this, but I hope to in the near future to get a better idea of where things are headed. So these are my notes as of now, strictly relating to failover cluster instances (FCI), AlwaysOn Availablity Groups are coming, but are not in the latest CTPs of SQL Server on Linux.
It was faster than building a Windows cluster
It took me a while, I laughed, I cried, I cursed a lot, but if I look at the time it took for me to actually build the cluster and install SQL Server, it was a much faster process. Much of this comes down to the efficiency of the SQL Server installation process on Linux, which is as simple as running yum install mssql-server (mostly). Which leads me to my next point..
Installation options would be nice
The cluster building process is a little kludgy. Basically, you install two standalone instances of SQL Server, and then remove the data files from one them, and copy them into your NFS share. Having the option to do the equivalent of an “Add Node” install, would mean you wouldn’t need to worry about cleaning up your second node.
There’s no cluster validation, explicitly
This is a bit scarier, or easier depending on your view point. There are tests at various parts of the process to make sure things are working. For example, the first step of building your Linux cluster is to authorize the nodes to take part in the cluster, which validates certain security and network settings. However, the storage validation consists of starting and stopping SQL Server on each node to make sure it can talk to the storage and startup. Given that Microsoft doesn’t own the clusterware for this solution, I’m not sure how much they can enhance that, or if they will. This is a good open question.
There’s no dns
(Happy Late Birthday Kris!) One interesting thing I realized after talking to Allan was that I did all of my networking setup through the /etc/hosts file on each individual node. I remember doing this for RAC, and I think it may be a requirement of Pacemaker, but you will still want to make a DNS entry for your cluster identifier. When you do this on Windows, if you are using Active Directory for DNS, the installation does this for you. Not in Linux, you will need to do this yourself.
Get comfortable with command line and scripting
There’s no cluster wizard to get you through the process. I think this isn’t a huge deal—Denny and I were talking yesterday about how relatively easy it would be to script the whole process in bash (I’m holding off until I find out if Microsoft is doing this), and most Linux sysadmins are really comfortable with writing bash scripts. But if you aren’t comfortable with Linux and the command line, now is the time to brush up, before things go prod.
Summary
We are in the very early days of this process, there is much that will likely change. From a functional and conceptual perspective, this is very similar to the way a SQL Server Failover Cluster works in Windows, but the implementation is quite different. I’d like to see things resemble Windows a bit more, at least from a SQL Server perspective, but we’ll see where the product heads.
