Multi-master (HA)

[Evan Hunt]

On Tue, May 06, 2014 at 06:20:11PM +0000, Baird, Josh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> For those of you who operate at multiple sites or datacenters, are you
> doing any HA for your BIND masters?  Ideally, we would have a master in
> each datacenter; maybe not an active one, but one that is standing by in
> case your primary master becomes unavailable.  
> 
> Do you have multiple "active" masters and list them as master in each of
> your slave's zone definitions?  This seems like it could get rather
> messy.  One thought is to use a technology like VMWare SRM which will
> spin up a master/virtual machine automatically in a second datacenter if
> your primary master goes down.  This coupled with Layer2 connectivity
> between your sites could make things fairly simple.  The
> standby/secondary master would retain the same IP address as your
> primary, so everything should just *work*.  
> 
> What are others doing?  Any thoughts, ideas or advice is much
> appreciated.

Thank you for bringing this up.  As it happens, high-availability/
multi-master support in BIND is something we've been seriously considering
for a future release.  There's been a lot of internal discussion of use
cases, requirements, and possible design approaches.

I don't want to influence the conversation here by saying too much about
the ideas we've had so far, but I wanted to say: if anyone has specific
thoughts on how to make this sort of thing easier in BIND -- even just at
the level of "boy, it irritates me that I can't make BIND do <X>" --
such comments will fall on welcoming ears.

-- 
Evan Hunt -- each at isc.org
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.