On 17th October I’ll be running a hands-on workshop on the various technologies available to provide High Availability using MySQL. The workshop is being held on 17th October (the day before the All Your Base conference) in Oxford (UK). The cost is £250 + VAT and you can register here.

This workshop provides an introduction to what High Availability (HA) is; what technology options are available to achieve it with MySQL and how to actually implement your own HA solutions. The session will be a mixture of presentations, demonstrations and (most importantly) hands-on tutorials.

We’ll start with an overview of High Availability – in general and in the context of MySQL and then a survey of the technologies to choose from:

• MySQL Replication
• MySQL Cluster
• DRBD
• Shared storage clustering options
  • Windows Server Failover Clustering
  • Solaris Clusters
  • Oracle Virtual Machine

There will be deep-dives on MySQL Replication and MySQL Cluster and this is where the hands-on parts of the workshop will focus:

• What these technologies achieve and how
• Get your own database clusters up and running (hands-on)
• “What happens when I do this…?” (hands-on)
• Monitoring (mix of hands-on and demos)

The plan is to get everyone up and running with multiple VMs on their laptops so that they can experiment and test with MySQL Cluster and MySQL Replication over multiple (virtual) hosts. As a stretch, we’ll try creating a Cluster running over everyone’s machine at the same time – though that might be stretching the logisitics! I’ve got a supply of 30 USB sticks and hope to have 2-3 unique virtual appliances on each – what could go wrong?