Using DRBD to Build High-Availability Clusters on Commodity Hardware

Charlie Schluting of LINBIT will explain how DRBD works and how people currently use it, with enough information to get you started building your own clusters.

DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device, and as the name implies, allows you to replicate block devices over TCP. DRBD is extremely flexible due to the fact it is a block device, and as such is used in a variety of situations. At the most basic level, you can replicate data between two servers to provide synchronously replicated storage redundancy for either failover or disaster recovery purposes. In active/active mode, you can also run GFS, OCFS2, or other clustered file systems.

Topics that will be covered: - How it works, history, and future exciting news regarding mainline kernel inclusion - How it is used: HA-iSCSI, HA-NFS, Virtualization, Apache, Samba, etc. - Cluster Resource Manager options and recommendations, and news about the confusing changes in the Linux-HA / Clusterlabs communities.

And the majority of the time will be spent on: - Example cluster configuration: hardware setup, installation and configuration, and cluster manager integration.

Come with questions!

Michael Wall Polybase – It’s What’s for Dinner

Polybase is Microsoft’s great new replacement to linked servers. With the current version in SQL Server 2019, one can connect to multiple data sources such as Teradata, Apache, Hadoop, Oracle, and many many more. We will review best practices for setting up Polybase and its Scale-Out groups as well as showing how it interacts in an AlwaysOn Availabilty Group. When Scaling-Out (up!), Polybase is able to work harder and deliver more data. What happens when one of its node disappears? We will have a live demo demonstrating how to manage the Scale-Out group when bad things happen. In addition, the DMVs for managing Polybase will be reviewed, and finally, there will be results of the impact of using multiple nodes in the Scale-Out group on the Polybase queries!