In the following article I have summarized some steps and hints to set-up a MySQL active/passive fail-over Cluster also sometimes called MySQL HA.

With such a set-up you can achieve a 99.99% (4x9) HA set-up for MySQL (52 minutes downtime per year). The same procedure also works for PostgreSQL, Oracle and other database systems running on Linux (DRBD runs on Linux only).

The concept

The concept of an active/passive fail-over Cluster is the following:

The following solutions are used with MySQL: