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 1. 1 SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
 2. 2 Support Statement for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability
    Extension 15 GA
 3. 3 What Is New?
 4. 4 Technology Previews
 5. 5 Cluster
 6. 6 High-Availability Tools
 7. 7 More Information and Feedback
 8. 8 How to Obtain Source Code
 9. 9 Legal Notices

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 GA

Release Notes #

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension is a suite of clustering
technologies that enable enterprises to implement highly available Linux
clusters and eliminate single points of failure. This document gives an
overview of features and limitations of SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability
Extension. Some sections do not apply to a particular architecture or product,
this is explicitly marked.

These release notes are updated periodically. The latest version is always
available at https://www.suse.com/releasenotes. General documentation can be
found at: https://www.suse.com/documentation.

Publication Date: 2018-06-05, Version: 15.0.20180518

1 SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
2 Support Statement for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 GA
3 What Is New?
4 Technology Previews

    4.1 SCSI Locking on Multipath With mpathpersist Resource Agent
    4.2 Container Bundles
    4.3 Clustering Support for MD RAID10 Devices
    4.4 QDevice/QNetd Support for Corosync Quorum Device

5 Cluster

    5.1 Support for Manual Tickets in Geo Clustering

6 High-Availability Tools

    6.1 Probing Guest Nodes for Resource Status
    6.2 AutoYaST Support for Geo Clustering
    6.3 IPVS Has Been Moved From the HA Extension to the Base OS
    6.4 crm Report (hb_report) Configuration File
    6.5 Hawk Data Files Installed to /usr/share/hawk

7 More Information and Feedback
8 How to Obtain Source Code
9 Legal Notices

1 SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension #

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension is an affordable, integrated
suite of robust open source clustering technologies that enable enterprises to
implement highly available Linux clusters and eliminate single points of
failure.

Used with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, it helps firms maintain business
continuity, protect data integrity, and reduce unplanned downtime for their
mission-critical Linux workloads.

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension provides all of the essential
monitoring, messaging, and cluster resource management functionality of
proprietary third-party solutions, but at a more affordable price, making it
accessible to a wider range of enterprises.

It is optimized to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and its tight
integration ensures customers have the most robust, secure, and up to date high
availability solution. Based on an innovative, highly flexible policy engine,
it supports a wide range of clustering scenarios.

With static or stateless content, the High Availability cluster can be used
without a cluster file system. This includes web-services with static content
as well as printing systems or communication systems like proxies that do not
need to recover data.

Finally, its open source license minimizes the risk of vendor lock-in, and its
adherence to open standards encourages interoperability with industry standard
tools and technologies.

2 Support Statement for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 GA
#

Support requires an appropriate subscription from SUSE. For more information,
see https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/highavailability/.

A Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
subscription is needed to receive support and maintenance to run geographical
clustering scenarios, including manual and automated setups.

Support for the DRBD storage replication is independent of the cluster scenario
and included as part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
product and does not require the addition of a Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux
Enterprise High Availability Extension subscription.

General Support Statement

The following definitions apply:

  * L1: Installation and problem determination - technical support designed to
    provide compatibility information, installation and configuration
    assistance, usage support, on-going maintenance and basic troubleshooting.
    Level 1 Support is not intended to correct product defect errors.

  * L2: Reproduction of problem isolation - technical support designed to
    duplicate customer problems, isolate problem areas and potential issues,
    and provide resolution for problems not resolved by Level 1 Support.

  * L3: Code Debugging and problem resolution - technical support designed to
    resolve complex problems by engaging engineering in patch provision,
    resolution of product defects which have been identified by Level 2
    Support.

SUSE will only support the usage of original (unchanged or not recompiled)
packages.

3 What Is New? #

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 introduces many innovative
changes compared to SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 12.

Make sure to also review the release notes for the base product, SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server 12 GA which are published at https://www.suse.com/
releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15.

To find out what is new in Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High
Availability 15 GA, see https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SLE-HA/15-GEO.

4 Technology Previews #

Technology previews are packages, stacks, or features delivered by SUSE which
are not supported. They may be functionally incomplete, unstable or in other
ways not suitable for production use. They are included for your convenience
and give you a chance to test new technologies within an enterprise
environment.

Whether a technology preview becomes a fully supported technology later depends
on customer and market feedback. Technology previews can be dropped at any time
and SUSE does not commit to providing a supported version of such technologies
in the future.

Give your SUSE representative feedback, including your experience and use case.

4.1 SCSI Locking on Multipath With mpathpersist Resource Agent #

In previous versions, the sg_persist resource agent only deals with the SCSI
device directly and could not handle multipath devices.

As a technology preview, the mpathpersist resource agent now has a new
functionality that allows for HA clusters that have a SCSI locking mechanism on
top of multipath.

4.2 Container Bundles #

Configuring containers as cluster resources often means configuring network and
storage resources and using the remote node feature to monitor services running
inside the container. Previously, there was no convenient way to configure
these resources and features.

As a technology preview, SLE HA 15 GA ships with the feature container bundles.
Container bundles allow managing Docker and Rkt containers together with
associated functionality like network ranges, port mapping and storage mapping.

4.3 Clustering Support for MD RAID10 Devices #

With SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15, RAID10 is included
as technology preview, which enables locking and synchronization across
multiple systems on the cluster, so all nodes in the cluster can access the MD
devices simultaneously.

4.4 QDevice/QNetd Support for Corosync Quorum Device #

For two-node clusters, quorum is normally not available. Therefore in the past,
to resolve split-brain scenarios, fencing had to be used in two-node clusters.

As a technology preview, Corosync 2.4 in SLE HA 15 GA now includes qnetd. qnetd
is a network quorum device that can be used for quorum that avoids the need for
fencing. This device can be used as a third node only for quorum. This extra
node is very lightweight and can therefore be shared among many two-node
clusters.

5 Cluster #

5.1 Support for Manual Tickets in Geo Clustering #

Previously, granting tickets always required a quorum of the geo cluster. This
meant that for a geo cluster with only 2 sites, it was not possible to grant a
ticket if one site was lost. Hence, an arbitrator had to be used in all 2-site
geo cluster setups.

With SLE HA 15 GA, you can now manually grant tickets to the healthy site if no
automatic fail-over is required in a split-brain scenarios. Manual tickets are
controlled only by administrator commands, which make them very
user-predictable. However, you must make sure yourself that none of these
tickets is granted to any other site at the same time.

The YaST Geo Cluster module now also allows configuring manual tickets.

6 High-Availability Tools #

6.1 Probing Guest Nodes for Resource Status #

With the new version, Pacemaker now also probes guest nodes for resource status
(Guest nodes are virtual machines that are created by resource agents such as
VirtualDomain and run the pacemaker_remote daemon). This change basically
unifies the behaviors in regard of probes for all types of nodes, cluster
nodes, remote nodes and guest nodes. This is important for preventing any
possible concurrency violations.

However if you have configured a location constraint with "-inf" score to
prevent a resource from running on a guest node, this might lead to problems
now. For example, if the software required by this resource is not installed on
the guest node, probing for resource status might fail on it.

If you have configured a location constraint with "-inf" score for keeping a
resource off a guest node, check the resource-discovery property for this
constraint. Set resource-discovery to never to prevent Pacemaker from probing
the resource on this node. Also when using Pacemaker Remote to scale a cluster
to hundreds of nodes, limiting resource discovery to allowed nodes can
significantly boost performance.

For more information, see http://clusterlabs.org/pacemaker/doc/en-US/Pacemaker/
1.1/html-single/Pacemaker_Explained/index.html#
_deciding_which_nodes_a_resource_can_run_on

6.2 AutoYaST Support for Geo Clustering #

Instead of installing manually, you can also use AutoYaST to clone the HA
configuration of existing nodes. However in the past, the Geo Clustering
extension had to be installed manually on all machines.

In SLE HA 15 GA, AutoYaST now has support for Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux
Enterprise High Availability Extension as well. This even includes support for
the new manual ticket mode (for more information, see Section 5.1, ?Support for
Manual Tickets in Geo Clustering?).

6.3 IPVS Has Been Moved From the HA Extension to the Base OS #

IPVS (IP Virtual Server) implements transport-layer load balancing (Layer 4 LAN
switching) in the Linux kernel. In SLES 12 and prior versions, IPVS was shipped
only with the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability extension. However, IPVS
is increasingly used outside the HA context, for example by Docker.

With SLES 15, IPVS has been moved into the base system. Other HA-related
functionality that relies on IPVS remains part of the HA extension.

6.4 crm Report (hb_report) Configuration File #

When creating reports, it may be desired to have certain options set each time.
Currently, these have to be documented or maintained externally.

hb_report now alows for a configuration file in which an administrator can
configure the report settings once, and have them apply to each report
generated in the cluster from then on.

6.5 Hawk Data Files Installed to /usr/share/hawk #

To make it possible to install Hawk on a system with a read-only root file
system, and to follow the FHS standard for where software packages should
install their files, Hawk should not install its data files into /srv/www.

The Hawk data files are now installed to /usr/share/hawk, with some runtime
data in

7 More Information and Feedback #

  * Read the READMEs on the media.

  * Get detailed changelog information about a particular package from the RPM
    (where FILENAME is the name of the RPM):

    rpm --changelog -qp FILENAME.rpm

  * Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of CD1 for a chronological log of
    all changes made to the updated packages.

  * Find more information in the docu directory of first medium of the SUSE
    Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension media. This directory includes
    a PDF version of the High Availability Guide.

  * https://www.suse.com/documentation contains additional or updated
    documentation for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 GA.

  * Visit https://www.suse.com/products/ for the latest product news from SUSE
    and https://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html for additional
    information on the source code of SUSE Linux Enterprise products.

8 How to Obtain Source Code #

This SUSE product includes materials licensed to SUSE under the GNU General
Public License (GPL). The GPL requires SUSE to provide the source code that
corresponds to the GPL-licensed material. The source code is available for
download at https://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html. Also, for up
to three years after distribution of the SUSE product, upon request, SUSE will
mail a copy of the source code. Requests should be sent by e-mail to
mailto:sle_source_request@suse.com or as otherwise instructed at https://
www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html. SUSE may charge a reasonable fee
to recover distribution costs.

9 Legal Notices #

SUSE makes no representations or warranties with regard to the contents or use
of this documentation, and specifically disclaims any express or implied
warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further,
SUSE reserves the right to revise this publication and to make changes to its
content, at any time, without the obligation to notify any person or entity of
such revisions or changes.

Further, SUSE makes no representations or warranties with regard to any
software, and specifically disclaims any express or implied warranties of
merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further, SUSE reserves
the right to make changes to any and all parts of SUSE software, at any time,
without any obligation to notify any person or entity of such changes.

Any products or technical information provided under this Agreement may be
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agree to comply with all export control regulations and to obtain any required
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exclusion lists or to any embargoed or terrorist countries as specified in U.S.
export laws. You agree to not use deliverables for prohibited nuclear, missile,
or chemical/biological weaponry end uses. Refer to https://www.suse.com/company
/legal/ for more information on exporting SUSE software. SUSE assumes no
responsibility for your failure to obtain any necessary export approvals.

Copyright ? 2010- 2018 SUSE LLC. This release notes document is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License (CC-BY-ND-3.0
US, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/).

SUSE has intellectual property rights relating to technology embodied in the
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