Linux-HA (which is the initial working title) will be a huge project,
requiring lots of different conceptual and programming skills. In the
commercial marketplace, HA installations tend to be large system
integration projects, and this is what this is also about. Please
note that commercial HA is not a niche product -- especially in the
high end server market, HA is today key to selling Unix solutions. HA
on Windows NT, on the other hand, is just in its infancy compared to
Unix...
Generally, Linux already has some features which are required by
Linux-HA but a lot still has to be done. This new project should gain
the visibility (and possibly donations from the industry) which is
needed to get the things done that are required.
To provide for the basic concepts, I set up the Linux High
Availability HOWTO which can initially be found on
http://www.muc.de/~hm/linux/HA/High-Availability-HOWTO.html. Developers
who are interested in HA concepts (especially subscribers of the
mclinux mailing list which was closed recently) may want to look
there.
There is also a closed mailing list for Linux-HA. "Closed" means that
only subscribers will be allowed to post messages to the list to
prevent most spammers from sending their crap. If you are interested,
send mail to linux-ha-request@muc.de with the string "subscribe" in
the body or subject. The mailing list itself is linux-ha@muc.de. There
may also be a one-way (i.e. read-only) mail-to-news gateway for the
newsgroup muc.lists.linux-ha.
For those of you who manage to come to the Linux Kongress in Wuerzburg
(http://www.linux-kongress.de/) there will be a BoF session concerning
the project.