High availability is crucial to mission-critical production environments. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On provides reliability and availability to critical production services that use it. Today, we’re sharing performance improvements and image updates around the High Availability Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Azure.
Pacemaker
Pacemaker is a robust and powerful open-source resource manager used in highly available compute clusters. It is a key part of the High Availability Add-On for RHEL.
Pacemaker has been updated with performance improvements in the Azure Fencing Agent to significantly decrease Azure failover time, which greatly reduces customer downtime. This update is available to all RHEL 7.4+ users using either the Pay-As-You-Go images or Bring-Your-Own-Subscription images from the Azure Marketplace.
New pay-as-you-go RHEL images with the High Availability Add-On
We now have RHEL Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) images with the High Availability Add-On available in the Azure Marketplace. These RHEL images have additional access to the High Availability Add-On repositories. Pricing details for these images are available in the pricing calculator.
The following RHEL HA PAYG images are now available in the Marketplace for all Azure regions, including US Government Cloud:
New pay-as-you-go RHEL for SAP images with the High Availability Add-On
We also have RHEL images that include both SAP packages and the High Availability Add-On available in the Marketplace. These images come with access to SAP repositories, the High Availability Add-On repositories, and have 4 years of support per standard Red Hat policies. Pricing details for these images are available in the pricing calculator.
The following RHEL for SAP with HA and Update Services images are available in the Marketplace for all Azure regions, including US Government Cloud:
- RHEL 7.4 for SAP with HA and Update Services
- RHEL 7.5 for SAP with HA and Update Services
- RHEL 7.6 for SAP with HA and Update Services
Refer to the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory to see the list of SAP-certified Azure VM sizes.
You can also get a full listing of RHEL images on Azure, including the RHEL with HA and RHEL for SAP with HA images with the following Azure CLI command:
az vm image list --publisher redhat --all
Support
All the RHEL with HA and RHEL for SAP with HA images on Azure are fully supported by the Red Hat and Microsoft integrated support team.
See the support site here and the Red Hat support site here.
Full details on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support lifecycle are available here.
Next steps
- Visit the Red Hat on Azure site to learn more about Red Hat workloads on Azure.
- View pricing information at the pricing calculator.
- Get started with the RHEL HA PAYG images and the RHEL for SAP with HA PAYG images.
- Learn to create a Pacemaker cluster for SAP using RHEL by following our instructions here.
- Deploy SAP on RHEL with our Quickstart Guide.
