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Can I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 AP Cluster Suite on VMWare?
Article ID: 17345 - Created on: Jun 15, 2009 10:10 PM - Last Modified: Jul 17, 2009 1:50 PM
Problem
Is Cluster Suite, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, supported when running as a guest operating system on VMWare?
Solution
Cluster Suite requires a fencing agent for support. A fencing agent, fence_vmware, was introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, as a Technology Preview, to provide power fencing capabilities. fence_vmware uses ssh to connect to ESX servers and run local API commands to fence VMWare ESX guests. In order to fence the appropriate guest, there are some limitations imposed by fence_vmware.Limitations:
- Long form of the guest name that includes the ESX host name is required as the argument to fence_vmware. Short names cannot be used.
- Virtual Center High-Availability features cannot be used in conjunction with Cluster Suite. This feature, and generic guest migration feature, changes the required inputs to the fence_vmware agent and are not tracked automatically. A future version of fence_vmwar will remove this limitation.
- Mixing cluster nodes across VMWare, and Red Hat Virtualization technologies is not supported. The cluster must be uniform.
Use Case Scenario
- X cluster nodes are running on Y ESX hosts
- Only cluster nodes are running on ESX hosts
- Virtual Center can be running, but cannot be used for HA or migration
- Second level power fencing of ESX hosts is required if shared storage is required for cluster nodes.