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[Gary4gar]

Hi,
I was googling for HA related topics and found this article. its practical and cost effective.

Although Linux is known to be an extremely stable operating system, the fact that the standard PC hardware is not quite so reliable must not be overlooked. I have been maintaining Linux servers for a long time, and in most cases when a system has failed, it has been due to server hardware failure. UNIX in the commercial world is known for having good clustering and high-availability (HA) technologies.

In my present company, Electec, we rely heavily upon e-mail (Sendmail and IMAP4), Windows file sharing (Samba), FTP and dial-up authentication (radius) services on a 24-hour basis for communication with our suppliers, staff and customers who are located in different time zones. Until recently, all of these services were consolidated on one Linux server. This system had served us very well. However, it was just a matter of time before a hardware failure occurred, which would cause us loss of productivity and revenue.

High availability is becoming increasingly important as we depend more and more on computers in business. I decided to design and implement an inexpensive high-availability solution for our business-critical needs without requiring the use of expensive additional hardware or software. This article covers the design aspects, pitfalls and implementation experiences of the solution.

Read Full:
A High-Availability Cluster for Linux

[wgwilkins]

You can always do DRBd to get HA on Linux. Also, there's the traditional approach of using load balancers and TCP/IP failover. Finally, if you get VMware VSphere, it has a Fault Tolerance feature that lets you mirror one VM across multiple hosts, so if you lose one host, the VM stays up.

-wgw

[BarackObama]

You can also try drbd with gfs and it would give your high availibility as well as high performance as both the nodes would be online. You will have to user ldirector for routing the ips to both the nodes.