MySQL/Galera in Pacemaker High Availability Clusters

In this walkthrough, you will create a Pacemaker managed MySQL/Galera cluster. It assumes that you are running on a Debian 6.0 (squeeze) box, but the concepts should be equally applicable to other platforms with minimal modifications.

It also assumes that your Galera cluster will consist of three nodes, named alice, bob and charlie. Furthermore, all cluster nodes can resolve each other’s hostnames.

Please note: All commands in this walkthrough require that you are logged into your system as root.

First, make sure you have the required packages installed. One of the easiest ways to get your hands on MySQL/Galera binaries is to install Percona XtraDB Cluster, which our friends at Percona make available in their public software repository.

Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/percona.list with the following content:

deb http://repo.percona.com/apt squeeze main

Fetch the Percona repository signing key:

apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 1C4CBDCDCD2EFD2A

You also require Pacemaker packages from the Debian backports repository. Do do so, create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list with the following content:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main

Now, update your package lists:

apt-get update

Once that is completed, you are able to install the percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.5 package:

apt-get -y install percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.5

Note that percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.5 conflicts with the standard Debian mysql-server packages, so if you have any of those installed, they will be removed in the process of installing XtraDB Cluster.

Stop the MySQL server services for the time being:

service mysql stop

Also required is the pacemaker package (and its dependencies) from squeeze-backports:

apt-get -t squeeze-backports install pacemaker

And finally rsync is required for one of the supported Snapshot State Transfer (SST) methods for Galera:

apt-get install rsync

Now, all required packages are installed and you’re ready to configure XtraDB Cluster.

This article originally appeared on the hastexo.com website (now defunct).