Obtaining, Installing, and Configuring MySQL Cluster on Other Platforms

There is one overriding thought that should be in your mind if you are reading this section: MySQL Cluster is not supported in any way on anything other than the following operating systems:

• Linux (Red Hat, Novell/SUSE)
• Sun Solaris
• IBM AIX
• HP-UX
• Mac OS X

Future versions of MySQL Cluster may add more officially supported platforms as more people use MySQL Cluster in production.

Notice that Windows is not included in the list. You should not even consider running it in a production environment on anything other than one of the listed operating systems. The only reason to install it on any other platform should be academic interest and to have a version to play with on whatever machine you use as your desktop.

If you are looking to run a version of MySQL Cluster on your Windows desktop, do yourself a favor and install an emulator such as VirtualPC or VMWare, both of which do a very good job of running any Linux distribution you choose. (CentOS is a good bet if you are fairly new to Linux.) If you have enough RAM, you can run many different virtual machines at the same time and try out things without having to have access to an actual cluster. There has been some work done running MySQL Cluster on Windows, but it is very buggy and incomplete, and we can't understand why you would want to use it.

We should also point out that in a production environment we recommend that you use Linux. This is not because Linux is superior to other operating systems on which MySQL Cluster is supported but simply that the vast majority of users use Linux, and it is the operating system on which MySQL Cluster is best tested and best supported. Solaris is the next most used platform, and in many ways it is similar to Linux. Other platforms are used by a fairly small number of users at the moment, so documentation and the user support available for them is not as good.

If you want to mix platforms, you should be fine, as long as all platforms within the cluster have the same endianness. There are four types, and you should keep to architectures in the same type:

• Pure big-endian Sun SPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC 970, IBM System/360
• Bi-endian, running in big-endian mode by default MIPS running IRIX, PA-RISC, most POWER and PowerPC systems
• Bi-endian, running in little-endian mode by default MIPS running Ultrix, most DEC Alpha, IA-64 running Linux
• Pure little-endian Intel x86, AMD64

You can mix the two most common architectures (Intel x86 and AMD64) with no problems, but you cannot mix a Sun SPARC system with an Intel x86 system.

You can install MySQL on Solaris and Mac OS X by downloading the pkg format binaries from the MySQL website. You can find more detailed installation instructions in the MySQL manual.

There are also binaries available for HP-UX and IBM AIX. To install on these platforms, you need the MySQL-max packages as well as the standard packages.

RAM Usage