Hetzner to stop support for High-Availability Setups

Hi chris,

No feedback yet. Virtual mac-addresses can be made work (ask Hetzner to give you one), although it's not terribly nice. From what I understood, it works something like this.

server1 - macAddress1 - ipAddress1
server2 - macAddress2 - ipAddress2

virtualMacAddress3 - ipAddress3

You can now give either server1 or server2 the virtualMacAddress3 along with ipAddress3, but while it has this mac and ip address, it cannot have the original mac and therefor the original ip address. This means that your server will not ever have an ip address under which it is always available. You'll always have to try between ipAddress1 and ipAddress3 for server1 and for the second server it will always be either ipAddress2 or ipAddress3. It will make everything a lot more complicated.

Don't try and add "fake" mac addresses on your own. The switches remember your mac address and will not give out any IP address to a different mac address. This will mean that once the mac address is changed, you will no longer be able to connect to their network until your original mac address is restored. Your nic will "remember" the mac address, so even a reboot won't restore it, and because your machine will be disconnected from the network, an automated remote reboot will not work either. They will have to switch off your server for 10 minutes or change the mac address back manually.

Don't take my word for the above, this is only to the best of my knowledge. I wish I had better news.

Regards,
toodles

 

I agree, this is a very plausible explanation. After all, taking a look at the pricing:

DS3000 = 1000GB/Month = €49 = €0.049/GB

Everything that goes over the 1000GB/Month costs €0.09/GB, almost twice as expensive. Therefor it's cheaper to use a high-availability(HA) solution in terms of traffic, if you're using a lot of traffic. Of course, there's other ways to do this, but HA is of course nice to have... I mean, it IS highly available!

toodles

 

Hetzner Kundeninformation

Die Mail weiter unten kam gerade rein - es wird ernst!

Ich werde heute mal mit Herrn Fritzsche (Chef de Netz) telefonieren um nach alternativen Möglichkeiten zu fragen. Herr Pirner, der uns vor knapp 9 Monaten zugesichert hat dass unser Heartbeat-Setup bei Hetzner läuft meinte er wäre der richtige Ansprechpartner.

Unter Umständen würde Hetzner auch ein eigenes Netzsegment für uns Heartbeatler aufbauen, ich schlug vor die ca. 150 Kunden an den Kosten zu beteiligen. Immer noch besser, als der Zeit-/Kostenaufwand zu einem anderen Provider umzuziehen der Heartbeat anbietet. Und so einen wie Hetzner muss man auch erst mal wieder finden...

 

We've got the same message today.
Can you PM me the phone number of Mr Fritzsche?

 

I just called RZ6 and asked for him. If he's is not in place ask for a callback, he will do so... Hope we get this to a happy ending!

 

I've just tried to call him, but he wasn't there anymore. Will try again tomorrow.
Did you speak with him already? Any news?

 

Just want to add that I would also be willing to support a solution for HA at Hetzner. I got same email today and will lose my failover setup if I cannot get a solution.

I'm happy Hetzner customer of more than two years and would rather stay with them if they can find a solution, rather than migrate away.

 

I've just talked to Mr Fritzsche, and he said that everyone with a HA setup should write an email to [email protected] ; they'll collect the emails, and if there are enough of them, they will provide an alternative solution for us.

I've just sent my email, now it's everybody else's turn. PLEASE, write them an email and don't give up!

 

I've sent my email

 

Bad news - Hetzner will not provide an alternative to the new routing concept, because only about 20 customers use this technique. Our heartbeat-setups will definately not work in 2009 any more!

Did anyone already find other providers that allow failover with heartbeat?
Up to now I only found Netbuild: http://www.netbuild.net

 

How about IPX-Server (www.ipx-server.de) maybe the do support this?

 

Same here. I've sent Mr Fritzsche a few mails, but they really have no alternative in place, not even a web interface/API to allocate the IP addresses... (with an API it would have been possible to write a script to move the "virtual" IP address from one load balancer to the other).

 

www.leaseweb.com (NL) have told me they will support failover if you order two servers in the one rack.

Anyone here had experience with leaseweb?

 

I don't know that company, so I can't tell much about it...
I wonder if we can have virtual IPs if we rent a rack at Hetzner. Does anyone know?

 

Any more information about setting up with a rack in Hetzner? I'm ready to order servers with leaseweb and move from Hetzner if there's no solution here.

 

Adding final note here. I'm moving to i3d.net in NL

They have good prices, support HA, have second NICs in the servers for VLAN.
They were knowledgeable in pre-sales questions, and quick with support queries once I got the servers.

I decided against leasweb since they were slow to respond to pre-sales technical questions. Also, I didn't like their SLA which was non-existent unless you purchase add-on SLA.

 

I was wondering, will LVS tunneling also not work with Hetzner?

 

HowtoForge has just been offline for one hour because Hetzner did the switch although they told us that we have time to change our configuration until December 31...

 

Not sure if it's interesting but HAProxy seems to work fine as a HTTP loadbalancer with Hetzner.