Database Replication – Master-Master Setup on 5 Servers

MULTIMASTER SETUP

I would recommend a multimaster setup only with the idea that you restrict Asia's data to one master, and Europe's data to the other master. As for the shared databases, make sure auto_increment_increment and auto_increment_offset are in full use. In addition, make sure you only write Asia's data to the shared databases at the Asian DC and likewise with Europe.

STORAGE ENGINE CONSIDERATIONS

If there is no specfic reason to keep MyISAM (such as FULLTEXT indexing or heavy volume reads), I would recommend converting everything to InnoDB. That way, if a server crashes, then crash recovery can bring databases to a consistent state. With MyISAM, tables can be left in a crashed state and repairing those tables may result in the disappearence of one or more rows of data.

HIGH AVAILABILITY

You should strengthened your HA Setup by implementing DRBD. DRBD should be setup as at each DC. What are the benefits?

• You maintain a disk-level replica of the mysql data within both data centers
• You can have automatic failover within each data center
• You only worry about MySQL Replication between DCs

REPLICATION

To minimize data loss with MySQL Replication over geographic distance, I would recommend using smaller binary logs. By default, a binary log/relaylog is 1G (max_binlog_size and max_relay_log_size). You can make these values much smaller. I got this idea from PostgreSQL because WAL files are 16M by default. This creates more log files, but those log files will be closed and complete faster on the acting slave. If you are not using it, you should upgrade to MySQL 5.5 because it has Semisynchronous Replication. It can be tuned to detect heartbeat timeouts with some granularity.

I wrote about some of these concepts in an earlier post back on March 29, 2011.

I wrote up an interesting layout last year which features DRBD pairs in two data centers (DC1,DC2) with as follows

• DRBD Pair in DC1 (db1 and db2)
• DBVIP for Primary of DRBD Pair1 is 10.1.2.30
• DRBD Pair in DC2 (db3 and db4)
• DBVIP for Primary of DRBD Pair2 is 10.1.2.40
• Have MySQL Circular Replication Between DRBD Primaries
• Have the 10.1.2.40 as Master_Host for DBRD Pair 1
• Have the 10.1.2.30 as Master_Host for DBRD Pair 2

MySQL high availability, failover and replication with Latency

MySQL Replication : 1 Slave / Multiple Masters

Here is why I suggested this: Using two data centers, you setup automatic failover for DRBD Pair in one data center. Let the other DRBD Pair in the second data center be for DB disaser site with it own local redundancy and failover. Should you ever loses one data center, the other data center is fully read with it own local failover setup. Your app would just have to use the DBVIP of the other database center in such a catastrophic case.

Please keep in mind that using DRBD in conjunction with MySQL is only beneficial if all of your data uses the InnoDB Storage Engine. Hard failovers in DRBD could easily result in crashed MyISAM tables.

Here is another setup to consider:

As with DRBD setups, any DRBD Secondary would provide just a Disk-Level copy of your MySQL Folder. It is available as a warm standby. MySQL is not being run on the DRBD Secondary. If you want the third DB server to become hot standby, ditch DRBD altogether and use pure MySQL Replication. With three DB servers, using db3 at a remote site, simply setup the following:

+--> db1 --> db2 --> db3 -->+
^                           |
|                           V
+<--------------------------+

Using your rudimentary failover, now you have two hot standby servers. You just have to make sure each DB server has a unique server_id value. I also recommend using MySQL 5.5 because it uses SemiSync Replication which is more sensitive to communication failures and stop Replication better. You will have to setup the appropriate heartbeats and timeouts.