Red Hat Cluster Suite provides high availability and clustered storage for RHEL platforms.  Unfortunately the configuration management for each node can be tedious as the /etc/cluster/cluster.conf file must be copied to each as changes are made.  Conga makes life a little simpler.

http://sourceware.org/cluster/conga/

Conga provides a client/server architecture for cluster management with the ricci and luci services.  Luci acts as the configuration interface and sends instructions the the ricci client on each server.  Ricci takes instructions from luci and updates cluster.conf as necessary.

Package Installation and Configuration

Install the Cluster Suite with the following package group installation commands:

yum groupinstall "Clustering"
yum groupinstall "Cluster Storage"

Once installed luci must be initalized on one node.  The initialization script will ask for a password for the default admin account.

luci_admin init
/etc/init.d/luci restart

Next start ricci on all nodes that will be joined to the cluster.

/etc/init.d/ricci start

Log In to the Web Interface

Use the url provided by the luci_admin script to login to the web interface.

Luci Login

Coming in Part 2

In the next post I’ll go over the basics of initializing a cluster via Conga.  Seeing as luci and ricci do occasionally get in a fight I will provide some tips on dealing with these situations also.