vmware

From time to time we see at Galera Cluster customer engagements the following, for me scary, warning in the MySQL error log:

[Warning] WSREP: last inactive check more than PT1.5S ago (PT7.06159S), skipping check

We mostly see this in VMware set-ups. Some further enquiry with the Galera developers did not give a satisfying answer:

InnoDB is known to have crash-recovery capabilities and thus is called a crash safe storage engine (in contrary to MyISAM). Nevertheless under certain circumstances it seems like InnoDB pages can get corrupt during a crash and then a manual crash-recovery is needed.

Or an active-active failover cluster à la VMware.

Today I have learned about a totally crazy/cool looking architecture where the expensive VMware ESX server was replace by a free/cheap VMware Workstation version in combination with DRBD.

Basically DRBD we name the poor man's SAN and that is exactly what this customer is doing. He replaced the SAN with DRBD and now he can easily move one VMware instance to the other host. Possibly it is not that flexible and powerful as an ESX Server but also not so expensive...

The architecture looks as follows: