Introduction

This document provides information about installing, configuring and managing Red Hat Cluster components. Red Hat Cluster components are part of Red Hat Cluster Suite and allow you to connect a group of computers (called nodes or members) to work together as a cluster. This document does not include information about installing, configuring, and managing Linux Virtual Server (LVS) software. Information about that is in a separate document.

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Cluster_Administration RHEL 5.0 (2008-06-01T14:54)

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Chapter 1. Red Hat Cluster Configuration and Management Overview

1.1. Configuration Basics

To set up a cluster, you must connect the nodes to certain cluster hardware and configure the nodes into the cluster environment. This chapter provides an overview of cluster configuration and management, and tools available for configuring and managing a Red Hat Cluster.

Configuring and managing a Red Hat Cluster consists of the following basic steps:

1.1.1. Setting Up Hardware

1.1.2. Installing Red Hat Cluster software

To install Red Hat Cluster software, you must have entitlements for the software. If you are using the Conga configuration GUI, you can let it install the cluster software. If you are using other tools to configure the cluster, secure and install the software as you would with Red Hat Enterprise Linux software.

1.1.3. Configuring Red Hat Cluster Software

Configuring Red Hat Cluster software consists of using configuration tools to specify the relationship among the cluster components. Figure 1.2, “Cluster Configuration Structure” shows an example of the hierarchical relationship among cluster nodes, high-availability services, and resources. The cluster nodes are connected to one or more fencing devices. Nodes can be grouped into a failover domain for a cluster service. The services comprise resources such as NFS exports, IP addresses, and shared GFS partitions.

1.2. Conga

Conga is an integrated set of software components that provides centralized configuration and management of Red Hat clusters and storage. Conga provides the following major features:

1.3. system-config-cluster Cluster Administration GUI