Severalnines releases ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera in cooperation with Codership

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Stockholm – October 25^th 2011

Severalnines, provider of automation and management software for easily usable, highly available and auto-scalable cloud database platforms, today announces the release of ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera in cooperation with Codership, the replication experts organisation that leverages the latest developments in computer science to produce fast and scalable synchronous replication solutions that "just work" for databases and similar applications.

Introducing ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera

ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera enables customers to Deploy, Manage, Monitor and Scale a clustered MySQL database platform based on Galera Replication.

Developers and DBAs now have access to all of the features of Severalnines' flagship product ClusterControl™ specifically adapted to MySQL Galera.

Designed to address issues and needs of MySQL users relying on MySQL Replication, ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera offers a complete set of tools to assist developers and administrators of all skill levels to deploy, manage, monitor and scale their replicated MySQL databases.

What is MySQL Galera?

MySQL Galera is a synchronous multi-master cluster for MySQL/InnoDB or, in similar words, a synchronous multi-master replication plug-in for InnoDB. It is very different from the regular MySQL Replication and addresses a number of issues including write conflicts when writing on multiple masters, replication lag and slaves being out of sync with the master. Users do not have to know which server they can write to (the master) and which servers they can read from (the slaves). With MySQL Galera you can simply write and read from any MySQL Server.

Galera Cluster Use Cases

Galera replication works for a wide variety of use cases for high availability and scalability where you tolerate no lost of transactions or no slave lag or you look for write/read scalability Here are some common use cases where Galera can be used.

· Read Master

o Traditional MySQL master-slave topology, but with Galera all "slave" nodes are capable masters at all times, it is just the application who treats them as slaves. Galera replication can guarantee 0 slave lag for such installations and due to parallel slave applying, much better throughput for the cluster.

· Write Scalability

o Distributing writes across the cluster will harness the CPU power in slave nodes for better use to process client write transactions. Due to the row based replication method, only changes made during a client transaction will be replicated and applying such a transaction in slave applier is much faster than the processing of the original transaction. Therefore the cluster can distribute the heavy client transaction processing across many master nodes and this yields in better write transaction throughput overall.

· WAN Clustering

o Synchronous replication works fine over the WAN network. There will be a delay, which is proportional to the network round trip time (RTT), but it only affects the commit operation.

· Disaster Recovery

o Disaster recovery is a sub-class of WAN replication. Here one data center is passive and only receives replication events, but does not process any client transactions. Such a remote data center will be up to date at all times and no data loss can happen. During recovery, the spare site is just nominated as primary and application can continue as normal with a minimal fail over delay.

· Latency Eraser

o With WAN replication topology, cluster nodes can be located close to clients. Therefore all read & write operations will be super fast with the local node connection. The RTT related delay will be experienced only at commit time, and even then it can be generally accepted by end user, usually the kill-joy for end user experiences is the slow browsing response time, and read operations are as fast as they possibly can be.

Features and benefits of MySQL Galera

Galera features

· Active-active multimaster cluster

· Synchronous replication for InnoDB

· Read and write to any MySQL Server

· Automatic failover and node joining

· True Parallel replication

· Direct client connections

Galera benefits

· No slave lag or lost of data or out-of-sync situations.

o All nodes are consistent.

· Scales writes and reads

· Works synchronously over LAN/WAN/CLOUD

· No changes to applications

View all of the features here

Deploying a Galera cluster with ClusterControl™

A Galera cluster can be configured using the Severalnines Configurator

Our Online Tutorial provides an in-depth view and understanding of Galera cluster, covering the following topics:

· Introduction to Galera cluster

· Differences between MySQL Replication and Galera replication

· The pros and cons of Galera cluster

· Using Galera cluster to replicate between data centers

· Certification-based Replication

· Deploying a Galera cluster

· Failure handling with ClusterControl™ and Galera

· Adding a node to a Galera cluster

· Schema changes in Galera cluster

Try the ClusterControl™ Configurator for MySQL Galera today or book a demo to see it live in action!

· ClusterControl™ Configurator for MySQL Galera – try it today!

· Online Tutorial – ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera

· Severalnines Knowledge Base

· Book a demo!

Please do reach out to us with your feedback on Facebook, LinkedIn, XING or directly via these contact details for fruitful and interactive discussions on this latest release. For 'instant' communication, feel free to follow us on Twitter!

About Severalnines

Severalnines provides automation and management software for easily usable, highly available and auto-scalable cloud database platforms. ClusterControl™, the company’s flagship product, used by developers and administrators of all skill levels, addresses the full deploy-manage-monitor-scale cycle. Severalnines has enabled over 7,000 deployments to date via its popular online configurator for clustered MySQL databases.

To see who is using Severalnines today, please visit our references page.

About Codership

Codership Oy was founded in 2007 by database clustering experts to exploit the latest developments in computer science and produce fast & scalable synchronous replication solutions for databases and similar applications. Currently, Codership offers multi-master cluster for MySQL database as open source. For more information about our open source MySQL Galera software and support offering, visit www.codership.com

© 2011 Severalnines AB. Severalnines and the Severalnines logo(s) are trademarks of Severalnines AB. MySQL is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Multi-master and read slaves using Severalnines

Tweet This blog post shows how you can use the Severalnines Configurator for MySQL Replication to deploy a Multi-master replication setup, and install ClusterControl.
You can also watch videos showing what is described below or read an even more detailed tutorial.

When the deployment is finished you have a set of tools to manage and monitor replication, as well as to add new slaves, and to perform failover.
You can choose:

• The number of slaves you wish to connect to the master->relay master.
  
• whether you want to use MySQL 5.5.x or Percona 5.5.x
  
• Semi-sync replication or not (semi sync really recommended)
  
• cloud provider (on premise/EC2/Rackspace

Please note that your hosts must resolve to a valid ip. If 'hostname -i' resolves to nothing or to 127.0.0.1 it will not work.

We recommend also that you don't use bi-directional replication. It may sound like a good idea, but in practice it is challenging to get it working well.

When deployed you can easily perform tasks as:

• Add new slaves
• Failover
• View replication health information
• Stop/start replication links
• Stage slaves
  

The Configurator for MySQL Replication is a wizard-like application and you have to enter details about the setup you want to have. When this is done you will get a tar.gz that contains the deployment and management scripts.

ClusterControl

The deployment process will also install ClusterControl which is a set of monitoring agents and functionality to manage the database installation. The agents are deployed on each server and collects host information and information from the local MySQL server a particular agent is monitoring (such as replication statistics and status information).

One server (dedicated) is denoted the ClusterControl server. It is holding a database, CMON DB, that contains data about the monitored hosts, and the reporting data from the local agents is stored in this database. On this server a Controller is running and faciliates failover etc.

Moreover, the ClusterControl server exposes a web interface that can be used to graphically see the health of the replication cluster (after the deployment is done, take a web browser and point it to http://clustercontrolserver/cmon :

From ClusterControl you can then upload a schema, and start loading in data into a database. As well as doing GRANTs etc. In the Enterprise version you an also define performance probes (to make sure you system is not degrading over time), tune queries, try out new queries before putting them in production. You also have a Query Monitor and explains at your hands.

Failover is automatic (if the master fails, the relay will become the new master). When the master comes up again, it will connect to the new master and sync up, become the relay, and the slaves will failover to the relay. We also make use of the replication features of MySQL 5.5 (such as relay recovery) and a bunch of other techniques.

You can also add slaves or remove slaves with the click of a button, as well as scheduling backups.

Installation
When you have finished the wizard you get a package that you should deploy on the ClusterControl server:

tar xvfz s9s-mysql-55.tar.gz
cd s9s-mysql-55/mysql/scripts/install
./deploy.sh

The 'deploy.sh' script will create data directories, install initd scripts, create mysql users, apply database GRANTs (those you defined in the Configurator), and install ClusterControl.

A while in 'deploy.sh' replication will be started, and it can look like this:

*******************************************************************************
*                   Starting replication                                      *
*******************************************************************************
Master hosts
------------
10.30.30.31: up
10.30.30.32: up
Slave hosts
------------
10.30.30.33: up
10.30.30.34: up
starting replication between 10.30.30.31 --> 10.30.30.32 (change master=1, reset master=1)
replication [started] 10.30.30.31 --> 10.30.30.32
starting replication between 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.33 (change master=1, reset master=0)
replication [started] 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.33
starting replication between 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.34 (change master=1, reset master=0)
replication [started] 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.34
master_host -->slave_host status  master_status  slave_status [binlog|m_pos|exec_pos|lag]
10.30.30.31 10.30.30.32 ok         binlog.000003:250 binlog.000003| 250| 250| 0
--- slaves follows ---
10.30.30.32 10.30.30.33 ok         binlog.000001:107 binlog.000001| 107| 107| 0
10.30.30.32 10.30.30.34 ok         binlog.000001:107 binlog.000001| 107| 107| 0

After this, ClusterControl will be installed. If you are using RPM based installation there can be rpm dependency problems (we install libmysqlclient.so.16), but it can conflict with what comes with your distribution. Please let us know if this happens, contact us on community@severalnines.com.

Starting/stopping Replication and basic examples

After having executed deploy.sh, you can view the status of the mysql servers:

cd s9s-mysql-55/mysql/scripts/
./status.sh  -a
Master hosts
------------
10.30.30.31: up
10.30.30.32: up
Slave hosts
------------
10.30.30.33: up
10.30.30.34: up

To view the replication status:

cd s9s-mysql-55/mysql/scripts/
./repl-status.sh -a
master_host -->slave_host status  master_status  slave_status [binlog|m_pos|exec_pos|lag]
10.30.30.31 10.30.30.32 ok         binlog.000003:250 binlog.000003| 250| 250| 0
--- slaves follows ---
10.30.30.32 10.30.30.33 ok         binlog.000001:107 binlog.000001| 107| 107| 0
10.30.30.32 10.30.30.34 ok         binlog.000001:107 binlog.000001| 107| 107| 0

To stop replication between 10.30.30.32 (relay master) to 10.0.30.33 you can do:

cd s9s-mysql-55/mysql/scripts/
./stop-repl.sh -m 10.30.30.32 -s 10.30.30.33
stopping replication between 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.33
replication [stopped] 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.33

To start replication again you can do:

cd s9s-mysql-55/mysql/scripts/
./start-repl.sh -m 10.30.30.32 -s 10.30.30.33
starting replication between 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.33 (change master=0, reset master=0)
replication [started] 10.30.30.32 --> 10.30.30.33

Other options for 'start-repl.sh' is -r (for reset master, dangerous), -c (change master). Normally these options are not needed but you can use them in conjuction with -l (logpos) and -f (binlog file) if you want to start replication from a particular position.

And we can check the replication status:

ubuntu@ip-10-49-122-115:~/s9s-mysql-55/mysql/scripts$ ./repl-status.sh -a
serverid master_host -->slave_host status  master_status  slave_status [binlog|m_pos|exec_pos|lag]
1      10.48.207.130 10.48.139.24 ok         binlog.000005:494 binlog.000005| 494| 494| 0
2     replication not activated - you must start replication on this link.
--- slaves follows ---
3      10.48.139.24 10.49.122.56 ok         binlog.000005:485 binlog.000005| 485| 485| 0
4      10.48.139.24 10.49.110.183 ok         binlog.000005:485 binlog.000005| 485| 485| 0

Good luck and don't hesitate to contact us at feedback@severalnines.com or community@severalnines.com if you have any problems or whatever it may be. You can also book a demo this if you want to know more.

Severalnines releases ClusterControl™ for MySQL Replication v. 1.1.9

Tweet Stockholm - October 4th 2011

Severalnines, provider of automation and management software for easily usable, highly available and auto-scalable cloud database platforms, today announces the latest release of its flagship product ClusterControl™ for MySQL Replication.

Introducing ClusterControl™ for MySQL Replication v.1.1.9

ClusterControl™ for MySQL Replication enables customers to Deploy, Manage, Monitor and Scale a clustered database platform based on the standard MySQL Replication.

Developers and DBAs now have access to all of the features of Severalnines' flagship product ClusterControl™ specifically adapted to MySQL Replication.

Designed to address issues and needs of MySQL users relying on MySQL Replication, ClusterControl™ for MySQL Replication offers a complete set of tools to assist developers and administrators of all skill levels to deploy, manage, monitor and scale their replicated MySQL databases.

Features and benefits

Config wizard
- Generates individual configurations based on application needs
- Creates deployment packages
- Deploys a Replication cluster in minutes
Config manager
- Sanity checks changes to configuration parameters
- Rolls out configuration changes to all servers and automates rolling restarts
Upgrade advisor
- Keeps users up-to-date by performing upgrades
- Applies minor patches or major upgrades
- Allows roll-back to previous versions
Availability manager
- Clusterware that detects process failures
- Automates MySQL master fail-over
- Performs recovery of failed database processes
Backup manager
- Schedule backups or allow users to start an immediate backup
- Monitor and browse existing backups
- Define retention policies
- No proprietary data formats
Monitor
- Granular end-to-end transaction and database operation monitoring
Query analyzer
- Analysis on cluster-wide running queries
- Global MySQL processlist
- Deep real-time and historical visibility into individual nodes
Alarms and notifications
Scale
- Add new Slaves (or remove) to the cluster without any downtime
- Easily specify hostnames of Slaves to be added

View all of the features here.

Automated fail-over with ClusterControl™

Standard MySQL Replication is easy to set up, and is probably the most widely used mechanism to provide high availability for MySQL. Unfortunately, it is somewhat fragile. There is no support for fail-over. Slaves can easily end up with different data from the master. Diverging datasets can cause replication to stop. Crashing masters can corrupt binary logs, which means replication is not possible any more.

ClusterControl™ addresses the problems associated with master fail-over and resynchronizations, and avoids data loss by taking advantage of semi-sync replication in MySQL 5.5.

ClusterControl™ automates fail-over and reconfiguration of the replication setup to keep the Replication cluster stable and running. This online tutorial explains the MySQL Replication architecture, and how different types of failures are handled.

Users can try it now by generating their deployment package.

Reources related to this release

Configurator for MySQL Replication
Tutorial: ClusterControl for MySQL Replication
Videos: Online Demos on MySQL Replication
Book a demo

Please do reach out to us with your feedback on Facebook, LinkedIn, XING or directly via these contact details for fruitful and interactive discussions on this latest release. For 'instant' communication, feel free to follow us on Twitter!

About Severalnines

Severalnines provides automation and management software for easily usable, highly available and auto-scalable cloud database platforms. ClusterControl™, the company’s flagship product, used by developers and administrators of all skill levels, addresses the full deploy-manage-monitor-scale cycle. Severalnines has enabled over 7,000 deployments to date via its popular online configurator for clustered MySQL databases.

To see who is using Severalnines today, please visit our references page.