DR setup for MariaDB Galera Clusters - mariadb

Question

I have two MariaDB Galera Cluster with 3 nodes.
Cluster 1 : MDB-01,MDB-02,MDB-03
Cluster 2 : MDBDR-01,MDBDR-02,MDBDR-03
These two clusters are in two different data centers which are in two geographical regions.
Cluster 1 is PRODUCTION cluster and Cluster 2 is DR cluster
Asynchronous replication using GTID has been setup between MDB-01 to MDBDR-01
as per given configuration in the link :
http://www.severalnines.com/blog/deploy-asynchronous-replication-slave-mariadb-galera-cluster-gtid-clustercontrol
(Link is asynchronous replication between MariaDB Galera Cluster to Stand alone MariaDB instance.
However I have setup same configuration for asynchronous replication between MariaDB Galera Cluster to MariaDB Galera Cluster)
I am able to switch from current slave MDBDR-01 => MDB-01 to MDBDR-01 => MDB-02 with below command :
CHANGE MASTER TO master_host='MDB-02'
However I am getting challenge how to point MDBDR-02 => MDB-01 in case of MDBDR-01 is down.
Could you please provide inputs to achieve pointing MDBDR-02 => MDB-01 or MDBDR-03 => MDB-01.

Answer 1

One thing you need to understand, that article briefly mentions, is that each MariaDB's GTID implementation can cause problems in this situation. Since each node maintains its own list of GTIDs and galera transactions do not have their own id, it is possible that the same GTID does not point to the same place on each server (see this article).
Due to that problem, I wouldn't attempt what you're doing without MariaDB 10.1. MariaDB 10.1.8 was just released and is the first GA release of the 10.1 line. 10.1 changes the GTID implementation so galera transactions use their own server_id (set via a config variable). You can then filter replication on the slaves to only replicate the galera id.
To switch to a different slave server, you will need to get that last GTID executed on the old slave. The gtid_slave_pos is stored in mysql.gtid_slave_pos, but mysql.* tables are not replicated. I'm not completely sure and I don't have a way of testing if the original GTID of a transaction is passed to the other slave galera nodes (i.e. if the master cluster's galera server_id is 1 and the slave cluster's galera server_id is 2 and MDBDR-01 gets a slave event with GTID 1-1-123, will MDBDR-02 log it as 1-1-123 or 1-2-456). I'm guessing that it doesn't since the new GTID implementation should change the server_id, but you may be able to verify this. Since you probably can't get the last executed master GTID from a different slave galera node, you will probably need to get the GTID from the old slave which may not be possible unless you gracefully shut down the old slave. You may need to find the GTID from the last executed transaction in the binlog on the new slave and try to match that to a transaction in the master's binlog. Also, if you're not using sync_binlog = 1, the binlog is not reliable and might be a bit behind.
Since each galera slave node probably doesn't know about the executed GTIDs and can't skip previous GTID events, you may also have to play with SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER to get to the correct position if the GTID you found is behind.
When you get the GTID (or a guess of it) you will then set up replication on the new slave the same way you set it up on the original slave. The following commands should do it:
SET GLOBAL gtid_slave_pos = "{Last Executed GTID}";
CHANGE MASTER TO master_host="{Master Address}", master_port={Master Port}, master_user="{Replication User}", master_password={Replication Password}, master_use_gtid=slave_pos;
START SLAVE;
You should also disable replication on the old slave before restarting it so the missed events don't get replicated twice.
Until the executed slave GTID is replicated through galera, which might never happen, failover like this will be a messy process.