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Chapter 2. Understanding Red Hat OpenStack Platform High Availability Features
Red Hat OpenStack Platform employs several technologies to implement high-availability. High availability is offered in different ways for controller, compute, and storage nodes in your OpenStack configuration. To investigate how high availability is implemented, log into each node and run commands, as described in the following sections. The resulting output shows you the high availability services and processes running on each node.
Most of the coverage of high availability (HA) in this document relates to controller nodes. There are two primary HA technologies used on Red Hat OpenStack Platform controller nodes:
- Pacemaker: By configuring virtual IP addresses, services, and other features as resources in a cluster, Pacemaker makes sure that the defined set of OpenStack cluster resources are running and available. When a service or entire node in a cluster fails, Pacemaker can restart the service, take the node out of the cluster, or reboot the node. Requests to most of those services is done through HAProxy.
- HAProxy: When you configure more than one controller node with the director in Red Hat OpenStack Platform, HAProxy is configured on those nodes to load balance traffic to some of the OpenStack services running on those nodes.
- Galera: Red Hat OpenStack Platform uses the MariaDB Galera Cluster to manage database replication.
Highly available services in OpenStack run in one of two modes:
- Active/active: In this mode, the same service is brought up on multiple controller nodes with Pacemaker, then traffic can either be distributed across the nodes running the requested service by HAProxy or directed to a particular controller via a single IP address. In some cases, HAProxy distributes traffic to active/active services in a round robin fashion. Performance can be improved by adding more controller nodes.
- Active/passive: Services that are not capable of or reliable enough to run in active/active mode are run in active/passive mode. This means that only one instance of the service is active at a time. For Galera, HAProxy uses stick-table options to make sure incoming connections are directed to a single backend service. Galera master-master mode can deadlock when services are accessing the same data from multiple galera nodes at once.
As you begin exploring the high availability services described in this document, keep in mind that the director system (referred to as the undercloud) is itself running OpenStack. The purpose of the undercloud (director system) is to build and maintain the systems that will become your working OpenStack environment. That environment you build from the undercloud is referred to as the overcloud. To get to your overcloud, this document has you log into your undercloud, then choose which Overcloud node you want to investigate.
