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	UKUUG LISA/Winter Conference High-Availability and Reliability 25-26 February 2004 Bournemouth

Tutorial: High Availability Clusters

Wed, 25 February 09:30 (a.m. only)

Tutors: Lars Marowsky-Bree (SUSE Labs) &
  Alan Robertson (IBM Linux Technology Centre)

Venue: The Queens Hotel, Meyrick Road, BH1 3DL

The tutorial is divided into two sessions, the first led by Lars Marowsky-Bree and the second by Alan Robertson. The tutorial will be of interest to users and systems administrators who want a deeper understanding of high availability clusters, or who have a particular interest in Linux HA and the Heartbeat cluster monitoring software.

Lars will explain the basics of high availability clusters and point out common misunderstandings and pitfalls. He will cover building highly available systems with Linux HA, basic set-up, terminology, fundamental and advanced concepts, different heartbeat media, IO fencing / STONITH, locking, requirements on applications, and give a brief overview of related projects.

In the second session, Alan will explain how developers can use and extend Heartbeat for their custom applications. He will cover the generic plugin system, "PILS", the generic IPC code, writing resource scripts, custom IO fencing (STONITH) modules and communication modules, using the heartbeat messaging system for cluster communications, and will touch on Ram Pai's Consensus Cluster Membership layer.

Tutors

Lars Marowsky-Bree

currently works as technical lead and developer for the SUSE Labs. His main areas of expertise are High Availability and Cluster related topics; ranging from storage (multi-pathing, RAID and replication) over network load balancing to Cluster Infrastructure Service, Resource Management and Administration.

Using Linux since 1994, his initial involvement with network operations (aka BOFH) provided him with lots of real-life experience about the various reasons for service outages and the one common factor. He soon began to appreciate the complexities in keeping a service running in the face of malicious software, possessed hardware, well-intentioned users and the world at large and loves to rant about it; this has kept him employed and invited to conferences ever since. In early 2000, he took the chance to work on Linux High Availability exclusively and joined SuSE.

 

Alan Robertson

has been an active developer and project leader for High-Availability Linux for several years. He maintains the Linux-HA project web (www.linux-ha.org), and has been a key developer for the open source heartbeat program. He joined IBM's Linux Technology Center in March 2001 from SUSE, before that he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff for Bell Labs where he had worked for 21 years.

Alan also jointly leads the Open Cluster Framework effort (www.opencf.org) to define standard APIs for clustering, and provide an open source reference implementation of these APIs.

PRICES

for this half-day tutorial, to include lunch, refreshments, and tutorial notes:

Standard £75 + VAT (early-bird rate until 30 January is £50 + VAT).

 

Commercial members are invited to pay the standard rate.

 

The non-member price is £175 + VAT.

 

The above prices are for those wishing to attend just the tutorial,. The tutorial can also be taken with the conference technical talk, and this is what we expect most people to do.

 

The Tutorial will start at 09.30 on Wednesday, 25 February and finish with lunch. Attendees will receive a full set of tutorial notes. Refreshments and lunch are included in the tutorial fee.

BOOKING DEADLINE: Wed, 18 February 2004. Early-bird booking deadline: 30 January 2004.