CentOS is the enterprise level Linux OS, which is 100% binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It acts as a free alternative to RedHat's commercial Linux offering, with only a change in the branding. A high performance cluster consists of a group of computers that work together as one set parallel, hence minimizing or eliminating the downtime of critical services and enhancing the performance of the application.
Chapter 1, Cluster Basics and Installation on CentOS 7, reviews the basic principles of clustering and outlines the necessary steps to install a cluster with two CentOS 7 servers.
Chapter 2, Installing Cluster Services and Configuring Network Components, coversetting up and configuring the basic required network infrastructure and clustering services.
Chapter 3, A Closer Look at High Availability, lists the components of a cluster in detail and demonstrates how to approach the split-brain problem by configuring the failover and fencing the cluster as a whole and the quorum of each node individually.
Chapter 4, Real-world Implementations of Clustering, covers how to implement a web server and a database server in your cluster.
Chapter 5, Monitoring the Cluster Health, talks about how to monitor the performance and availability of your cluster.
Chapter 6, Measuring and Increasing Performance, reviews performance tuning techniques for your recently installed high availability cluster.
To follow along with this book, you will need to download a CentOS 7 minimal install image from the project's website. You will be asked to install other packages (pacemaker, corosync, and pcs, to name a few examples) in each chapter as required.
This book is directed toward two groups of system administrators—those who want a detailed, step-by-step guide to setting up a high-performance and high-availability CentOS 7 cluster and those who are looking for a reference book to help them learn the necessary skills to ensure that their systems and the corresponding resources, and services are being utilized at their best capacity. No previous knowledge of performance tuning is needed to start reading this book, but the reader is expected to have at least some degree of familiarity with any spin-off of the Fedora family of Linux distributions, preferably CentOS.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows. To download the Employees table, go to https://launchpad.net/testdb/:
A block of code is set as follows:
HWADDR="08:00:27:C8:C2:BE" TYPE="Ethernet" BOOTPROTO="static" NAME="enp0s3" ONBOOT="yes" IPADDR="192.168.0.2" NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Highlight Install CentOS 7 using the up and down arrows ".
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