This session described the foundation behind Novell Cluster Services and the pure-linux Heartbeat 2 that comes in SLES10. And for me provided an introduction to Heartbeat 2. Among the features:
- 16 node clusters. NCS supports 32 node clusters, but apparently Storage Vendors have a price-point at 16 where things get eye-crosingly expensive when you go past 16 nodes. Ergo, Novell is capping support at 16 nodes.
- HB2 has dependancy tracking! Does Tomcat need to be up in order to launch Apache? HB2 can track that! Cooooooool.
- Run via EVMS, like NCS, and can support a number of filesystems like Reiser, OCFS2, and XFS.
- Split Brain Detection like NCS has will be in SLES11. Not SLES10, since at feature-freeze the SBD code was unsupportably unstable.