After almost a month long vacation, when college reopened, we at GLOSS could not wait to do something exciting!! And what could be more exciting than Open High Availability Clusters (OHAC). I attended a talk on OHAC by Tirthankar during my recent visit of Sun India Engineering Center at Bangalore. I was completely taken by the technology and I knew I am going to do something with it, the moment I get a chance. Anyways... the day I landed in college, I sat down to set up a one node cluster on my laptop! Million thanks to Tirthankar again, who spend almost whole of his Sunday with me over the phone helping me out in setting it up. I would be blogging how set up a one node cluster on Solaris SXDE some time very very soon.
Now about the talk! There was a decent audience of more than 40 students who came to attend the talk. I started the talk with playing the Big Bucks Bunny movie, which set up the mood of the audience and also allowed me to introduce them to Network.Com and from there pick up the topic of difference between grids and clusters.
Then I moved to the slides and I explained the architecture of OHAC and details of its functioning. It was an engrossing session, as explaining the functioning of a cluster and concepts like Disk Fencing can get tricky 
But it was nice to see every one interacting and asking questions to me!
Then was the turn of the Demo.. something which I was very eager to show. For this demo, I had prepared a single node cluster on my laptop. I had a zone running on which we had a cluster resource name movie-rg registered. The cluster agent was basically written to start RealPlayer on cluster and in case of a failure, it would make it failover to a functioning node of the cluster. The experience of setting up the cluster and getting the agent to work was truely amazing! As I said, I would be blogging about it soon, so check back soon. Here are two screenshots which shows how cluster took care of availability
Now when I reboot the zone, the cluster resource becomes online on the physical node
I will soon be doing one more follow up talk on OHAC where I would discuss how to setup clusters and write agents for OHAC! Once again... thanks to Tirthankar and Swathi for helping me out with OHAC!
Cool stuff dude.
Posted by Tirthankar on July 01, 2008 at 01:13 PM IST #
Great job, Abhishek! You may also want to encourage other students to try installing OHAC and let us know their experiences. I would say it's going to be a great learning experience.
Posted by Swathi on July 01, 2008 at 01:18 PM IST #
That is already in process Swathi. I have myself given a demo of installing cluster to a set of students in my hostel room :-P Actually I liked installing cluster so much that I installed it 2 times on two different machines after installing on my laptop! :) The interest levels in students is quite high after the talk so I am expecting more students to come up with Cluster installations.
Posted by Kumar Abhishek on July 01, 2008 at 01:46 PM IST #
Cool talk. We can probably even frame a contest around this. Let students submit ideas for clustering, writing agents, etc. Let's think.
Posted by Angad Singh on July 01, 2008 at 02:29 PM IST #
Good idea Angad.
Posted by Tirthankar on July 01, 2008 at 02:59 PM IST #