Hi,

I have two identical basic Dell Poweredge R300 servers - when I say
"basic", I mean no DRAC card, no redundant power supplies, etc.  Each has
a smaller disk (120GB) and larger disk (1TB), as well as 2 NICs.  I'm
planning to run (production) Apache/Tomcat/MySQL/DNS/e-mail services using
a BlueOnyx VM.

I've been experimenting with Proxmox (OpenVZ) and DRBD (in
primary/secondary due to BlueOnyx requiring an ext3 filesystem) to
replicate the larger 1TB disk (using the 2nd NIC on each server, connected
with a crossover cable), both of which seem to successfully do what I
want.  I've now been looking into how I could use Pacemaker for
HA/failover (i.e. automatic takeover of IP and services in case of failure
of a server)...

The conclusion I'm rapidly coming to is that I'd probably be better off
(less risk/complexity) configuring the machines to notify me in case of
error, and to then manually shutdown and migrate VMs on the problem
server.  Especially as I don't (or at least don't believe I) have suitable
devices for fencing/STONITH, etc., and adding hardware (DRAC cards,
redundant power supplies etc.) isn't an option.  So I have some questions
that I would very much appreciate people lending their experience to:

1) Is it worth persevering with setting up Pacemaker/HA?  Am I able to set
up a fairly simple (low risk) configuration that could provide automatic
failover of services (not necessarily in all failure scenarios), even if
not removing every single point of failure?

2) If so, is it possible to have a fairly "safe" configuration that would
migrate services in common failure situations (in my experience, disk
errors!) but that would not have the possibility of split brain etc.?

3) If not, it is easy to configure Pacemaker to simply alert a sysadmin of
problems?

Many thanks for any advice.

Gary
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