ProxySQL and MHA Integration

September 13, 2016
Author
Marco Tusa
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MHAThis blog post discusses ProxySQL and MHA integration, and how they work together.

MHA (Master High Availability Manager and tools for MySQL) is almost fully integrated with the ProxySQL process. This means you can count on the MHA standard feature to manage failover, and ProxySQL to manage the traffic and shift from one server to another.

This is one of the main differences between MHA and VIP, and MHA and ProxySQL: with MHA/ProxySQL, there is no need to move IPs or re-define DNS.

The following is an example of an MHA configuration file for use with ProxySQL:

NOTE: Be sure to comment out the “FIX ME ” lines in the sample/scripts.

After that, just install MHA as you normally would.

In ProxySQL, be sure to have all MHA users and the servers set.

When using ProxySQL with standard replication, it’s important to set additional privileges for the ProxySQL monitor user. It must also have “Replication Client” set or it will fail to check the SLAVE LAG. The servers MUST have a defined value for the attribute max_replication_lag, or the check will be ignored.

As a reminder:

OK, now that all is ready,  let’s rock’n’roll!

Controlled fail-over

First of all, the masterha_manager should not be running or you will get an error.

Now let’s start some traffic:

Let it run for a bit, then check:

Now perform the failover. To do this, instruct MHA to do a switch, and to set the OLD master as a new slave:

Check what happened:

Check ProxySQL:

In this case, the servers weren’t behind the master and switch happened quite fast.

We can see that the WRITE operations that normally are an issue, given the need to move around a VIP or change name resolution, had a limited hiccup.

Read operations were not affected, at all. Nice, eh?

Do you know how long it takes to do a switch under these conditions? real 0m2.710s yes 2.7 seconds.

This is more evidence that, most of the time, an MHA-based switch is caused by the need to redirect traffic from A to B using the network.

Crash fail-over

What happened if instead of an easy switch, we have to cover a real failover?

First of all, let’s start masterha_manager:

Then let’s start a load again. Finally, go to the MySQL node that uses master xxx.xxx.xxx.107

As before, check what happened on the application side:

So it takes ~10 seconds to perform failover.

To understand better, let see what happened in MHA-land:

MHA sees the server failing at xx:47, but because of the retry and checks validation, it actually fully acknowledges the downtime at xx:56 (~8 seconds after).

To perform the whole failover, it only takes ~2 seconds (again). Because no movable IPs or DNSs were involved, the operations were fast. This is true when the servers have the binary-log there, but it’s a different story if MHA also has to manage and push data from the binarylog to MySQL.

As you can see, ProxySQL can also help reduce the timing for this scenario, totally skipping the network-related operations. These operations are the ones causing the most trouble in these cases.

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Far
Enough.

Said no pioneer ever.
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