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Chapter 2. Getting Started: Overview

This chapter provides a summary procedure for setting up a basic Red Hat High Availability cluster consisting of two nodes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 6. This procedure uses the luci user interface to create the cluster. While this procedure creates a basic cluster, it does not yield a complete supported cluster configuration. Further details on planning and deploying a cluster are provided in the remainder of this document.

2.1. Installation and System Setup

Before creating a Red Hat High Availability cluster, perform the following setup and installation steps.
  1. Ensure that your Red Hat account includes the following support entitlements:
    • RHEL: Server
    • Red Hat Applications: High availability
    • Red Hat Applications: Resilient Storage, if using the Clustered Logical Volume Manager (CLVM) and GFS2 file systems.
  2. Register the cluster systems for software updates, using either Red Hat Subscriptions Manager (RHSM) or RHN Classic.
  3. On each node in the cluster, configure the iptables firewall. The iptables firewall can be disabled, or it can be configured to allow cluster traffic to pass through.
    To disable the iptables system firewall, execute the following commands. 
    # service iptables stop
# chkconfig iptables off
    For information on configuring the iptables firewall to allow cluster traffic to pass through, see Section 3.3, “Enabling IP Ports”.
  4. On each node in the cluster, configure SELinux. SELinux is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 cluster nodes in Enforcing or Permissive mode with a targeted policy, or it can be disabled. To check the current SELinux state, run the getenforce: 
    # getenforce
Permissive
    For information on enabling and disabling SELinux, see the Security-Enhanced Linux user guide.
  5. Install the cluster packages and package groups.
    1. On each node in the cluster, install the High Availability and Resiliant Storage package groups. 
      # yum groupinstall 'High Availability' 'Resilient Storage'
    2. On the node that will be hosting the web management interface, install the luci package. 
      # yum install luci