[rabbitmq-discuss] General questions about HA, Stability/Reliability and Broker Administration

[Dave Greggory]

Hey all,

This is one of the better mailing lists I've been, it seems to have a high 
signal to noise ratio here. 


I've presenting RabbitMQ as a solution to the powers that be on Monday and I 
would like to know about your experiences with using RabbitMQ in high volume 
environment needing guaranteed delivery.

1. Erlang VM/RabbitMQ management: It was a breeze for me to get RabbitMQ running 
on Ubuntu (<10m) but our  operations folks had a lot of trouble getting 
Erlang/RabbitMQ installed  on CentOs (>5hrs). I haven't run into any issues in 
our QA environment yet, but it's not very high volume. What type of issues 
should I expect in a production environment with regards to managing the Erlang 
VM and RabbitMQ in general? I'm looking at it from the perspective of having a 
game-plan for what to do when things go wrong and to have runbooks for 
operations people to follow for solving common and known problems that come up 
in day-to-day management of Erlang VM and RabbitMQ.
2. HA/Failover: I've seen the Pacemaker guide but I'm a little hesitant to set 
that up as we have little experience in house with Pacemaker/Corosync/DRBD. How 
many people use it for HA/Failover in production systems and how happy are you 
with it? Does it support failing over if the hard drive on one of the nodes die 
instead something a little more simple like a node running out of memory or 
hanging?
3. Out of the box live failover: I've read in a few places on site that this is 
coming in a future release? Do we have an idea of how far off this is (3 months? 
6 months? or too far off to speculate?)
4. What tools do you use for broker administration in production environments? 
Does anyone use BQL and have a good experience running it without any issues in 
a high volume/guaranteed delivery environment? It's not yet officially released 
so I don't want to run it in a production environment. If not, how do you 
manage? Tools built in-house? Is it even possible to do that without resorting 
to programming Erlang?
5. How do you monitor RabbitMQ nodes and what do you monitor for (I'm thinking 
of monitoring various queue sizes)? The Zenoss AMQP Plugin looks interesting to 
us, but I have been informed that it's not playing nice with latest Zenoss. 


Any other thoughts that come to mind... please feel free to share.
Thanks much,

Dave