High Availability

As more and more mission-critical applications move on the Internet, providing highly available services becomes increasingly important. One of the advantages of a clustered system is that it has hardware and software redundancy, because the cluster system consists of a number of independent nodes, and each node runs a copy of operating system and application software. High availability can be achieved by detecting node or daemon failures and reconfiguring the system appropriately, so that the workload can be taken over by the remaining nodes in the cluster.

In fact, high availability is a big field. An advanced highly available system may have a reliable group communication sub-system, membership management, quoram sub-systems, concurrent control sub-system and so on. There must be a lot of work to do. However, we can use some existing software packages to construct highly available LVS cluster systems now.