In part two of our article on DRBD and High Availability, we take you step-by-step through setting up Sun’s Virtualbox software, creating a couple of VMs, and then installing CentOS on those. These two virtual Linux boxes then serve as two nodes in our DRBD mirrored disk setup which we use as a platform to install MySQL.
DRBD, MySQL and the Virtualbox Setup – Database Journal
Keep on the lookout for our third part in the series next month. In that issue we’ll explain how the Linux Heartbeat project can be used to control the whole setup, and provide automatic failover in the event that one node goes down.
#1 by mike503 on January 5, 2010 - 3:29 am
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How is the I/O and other performance inside of Vbox?
Perhaps for webserver load I could see it working fine but DB I/O? Seems like that might be a stretch.
#2 by Sean Hull on January 5, 2010 - 3:35 am
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Hi Mike,
I guess I made some assumptions that might not be obvious to all readers.
You’re absolutely right, performance through the VM would not be acceptable. I/O would be slow not least because your two VMs and the larger OS are all sharing a single disk. But further, I wouldn’t run MySQL on a laptop or other single disk machine anyway.
The purpose of the article here is to create a virtual environment or sandbox within which an admin play around. You can pull the levers and turn the dials, and get comfortable with how all the moving parts work.
For production use you’d have two separate servers with their own disk subsystem or shared storage.
-Sean