Almost exactly two years ago, I released the first tutorial for building an HA platform for KVM VMs. In that time, I have learned a lot, created some tools to simplify management and refined the design to handle corner-cases seen in the field.

Today, the culmination of that learning is summed up in the “2nd Edition” of that tutorial, now called “AN!Cluster Tutorial 2”.

https://alteeve.ca/w/AN!Cluster_Tutorial_2

These HA KVM platforms have been in production for over two years now in facilities all over the world; Universities, municipal governments, corporate DCs, manufacturing facilities, etc. I’ve gotten wonderful feedback from users and all that real-world experience has been integrated into this new tutorial.

As always, everything is 100% open source and free-as-in-beer!

The major changes are:

* SELinux and iptables are enabled and used.
* Numerous slight changes made to the OS and cluster stack configuration to provide better corner-case fault handling.

* Architecture refinements;
** Redundant PSUs, UPSes and fence methods emphasized.
** Monitoring multiple UPSes added via modified apcupsd
** Detailed monitoring of LSI-based RAID controllers and drives
** Discussion on hardware considerations for VM performance based on anticipated work loads

* Naming convention changes to support the new AN!CDB dashboard[1]
** New alert system covered with fault and notable event alerting

* Wider array of guest OSes are covered;
** Windows 7
** Windows 8
** Windows 2008 R2
** Windows 2012
** Solaris 11
** FreeBSD 9
** RHEL 6
** SLES 11

Beyond that, the formatting of the tutorial itself has been slightly modified. I do think it is the easiest to follow tutorial I have yet been able to produce. I am very proud of this one! :D

As always, feedback is always very much appreciated. Everything from typos/grammar mistakes, functional problems or anything else is very valuable. I take all the feedback I get and use it to helping make the tutorials better.

Enjoy!

Digimer, who now can now start the next tutorial in earnest!

1. https://alteeve.ca/w/AN!CDB