Using HP Serviceguard for Linux to Provide High Availability for LAMP, December 2005

Approach

The existing Toolkits for Apache and MySQL have been leveraged to package the LAMP

setup with HP Serviceguard for Linux. The Apache and MySQL toolkits for HP

Serviceguard for Linux consist of sets of shell scripts that startup, shutdown and monitor

the Apache web server and the MySQL database applications. These two toolkits can be

used to simplify the packaging of Apache and MySQL with HP Serviceguard for Linux. In

the LAMP “Separate packages” configuration, these toolkits are employed as is. For the

single package configuration however, one package is created that is common to both

Apache and MySQL. This common package control script employs components from

both the Apache and MySQL toolkits to start, monitor, and stop the respective services.

High availability for Consolidated LAMP configuration

Figure 1: Apache and MySQL running as part of the same package in a Consolidated LAMP configuration

In the Consolidated LAMP configuration, MySQL database and the Apache Web Server

(with PHP) always run on the same server node in the cluster, where Serviceguard

continually monitors the health of these applications and also the node on which these

applications run. On detecting a failure of any application or in the case of a node

failure, both applications fail over to the alternate (adoptive) machine.

Here, Apache with PHP enabled and MySQL run on a single machine as a single

Serviceguard for Linux package. If either one or both of these applications fails or if the

node goes down, then both the applications switch to an alternate node. Such a

configuration is the easiest to control.

Web Contents

Apache

MySQL

MySQL data