A free Highly Availabile Database

The code for this post is available on GitHub

With the release of RavenDb4 and in combination with their Community License and Ubuntu Server Edition it is now possible to deploy a highly available database setup that is free of software licensing costs (server hosting costs obviously still apply)

To demonstrate a possible setup clone my vagrant-ravendb, navigate to the root folder and run

vagrant up

This will reproduce the network shown below: (as an aside, if you haven't already checked out vagrant[1] i highly recommend doing so)

The nice part is that you can perform the setup from a single instance. Navigate to https://raven1.mooo.com:8080 and enter your license by clicking the 'License Information' in the toolbar at the bottom on the right hand side. (do NOT enter the license on the other nodes as it will prevent them from being added to the cluster)

Navigate to Manage Server -> Cluster and click Add Node To Cluster - in the URL field enter the names of the other nodes e.g. https://raven1.mooo.com:8080/

Your cluster is now setup and should look like