Intel_RAID_HA_Solution_RHEL_WhitePaper

Intel® RAID High Availability Solution for Red Hat* Linux Systems White Paper Introduction
Revision 1.0 Intel Confidential
1
1. Introduction
1.1 Background
The Intel
®
RAID High Availability (HA) Solution is designed for small-to-medium businesses,
remote/branch offices or private cloud environments that need a high availability configuration of
a server with local storage. This configuration of the Intel
®
RAID HA solution provides two
servers, two hardware RAID controllers, and shared local storage with SAS disk drives. This
solution takes advantage of Linux clustering technology to provide the high availability
environment in a two-node cluster and takes advantage of the SAS interface to allow sharing of
storage. The overall design goal is to provide the high availability solution with a simple
installation and ease-of-use experience for the user or value-added-reseller.
1.2 Requirements and Configuration Diagram
The Intel
®
RAID HA solution requires the following:
 Two Intel servers (R2312 or equivalent)
 Two Intel hardware RAID Controllers (RS25SB008) plus the enablement key for each
controller
 The AXXRPFKHA2 enablement key kit which contains 1 key for each controller
 External JBOD (JBOD2224S2DP)
 Supported SAS disk drives (SATA drives are not supported)
 SAS cables connecting the servers to the JBOD storage unit
 Red Hat* Enterprise Linux 6.3 or higher
This solution fits into a typical infrastructure and includes “server node 1,” “server node 2,” and
the “External JBOD SAS Drive Enclosure” as indicated in the diagram below. As with any server
cluster solution, there needs to be a private LAN dedicated to cluster server communications in
addition to the public LAN that communicates with client systems. The public network must
provide Domain and Active Directory services, as well as DNS services to the failover cluster
server.