Re: question about HA in PG 9.0 - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Greg Smith
Subject Re: question about HA in PG 9.0
Date
Msg-id 4C942ECD.3040001@2ndquadrant.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to question about HA in PG 9.0  (Kasia Tuszynska <ktuszynska@esri.com>)
List pgsql-admin
Kasia Tuszynska wrote:

The doc is lovely but all of the examples are for linux, has anyone tired a Hot Standby streaming scenario on windows?  Any issues specific to windows?  I know that linux and windows environments “should” behave the same but actually running in both of those environments exposes many differences.


As there is a certain amount of helper scripting required to get Streaming Replication setup, and the usual scripting languages people tend to write them in (bash, Python, Perl) don't ship with Windows, you will have a bit of extra work to do here.  I'm not aware of any production-quality setups that have tested the 9.0 implementation under Windows yet, but the similar hard parts have certainly been done before with earlier versions.

I have been reading up on this issue most notably on http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Shared_Storage, where the suggestions have been gravitating to solutions on the physical level.

Are there any software level solutions? ( I have a feeling that this may be a stupid question, but I want to implement this in the cloud, and not potentially kill an ami instance)


The only way you will implement "Shoot the other node in the head" on EC2 approaching the same level of reliability a hardware solution provides is to do just that:  don't begin failover to a new node until you've made sure the unreponsive master has been killed, and its AMI instance disabled from powering back up again.  Automating that is exactly where I plan to go with redundant EC2 deployments of this type.  But you could do it as part of a manual failover if you had to.  You cannot let the original master touch the shared data store ever again once it's been taken out of the loop.  If your storage is on EBS, I'm not sure how that handles two attempts to attach a writer to the store, but you'd want to test that out too.

-- 
Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant US greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us
Author, "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance"    Pre-ordering at:
https://www.packtpub.com/postgresql-9-0-high-performance/book

pgsql-admin by date:

Previous
From: Bruce Momjian
Date:
Subject: Re: files under pg_clog directories are missing
Next
From: Greg Smith
Date:
Subject: Re: files under pg_clog directories are missing