V4 High Availability
Background
SARK HA V1 and V2 used Heartbeat and our own in-house written handlers for file replication and failover. The cluster was very reliable but limited in its ability to quickly fail-back after a failover event, usually involving some level of manual intervention. SARK V4 high availability uses an openAIS stack with DRBD to create a true cluster. Whereas HA1/HA2 ran as a fixed primary/secondary pair, V4 is not particularly concerned which cluster element is currently active, except in one corner case; that of switching PRI circuits between cluster nodes during fail-over and fail-back (See the section on rhino support below). The three principle software components used by V4 HA are Pacemaker, Corosync and DRBD. In broad terms, Pacemaker is the cluster manager, Corosync is the cluster communication component (it replaces Heartbeat) and DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is the data manager. SARK, and indeed Asterisk, know little about the cluster although both components are aware that it is running.
