Hi,
I am looking at different options to setup a failover machine for our Linux servers (no hardware solutions), I have set up DRBD with hearbeat before but I am wondering if this set up mentioned makes sense

- There are 2 machines on the the network and each of the machines are running with 2 kernels , one kernel just runs basic version of kernel with drbd and the other kernel has all the required modules along with software like apache , oracle etc..

- We run the kernel with all the software required on machine A and this is mounted on a DRBD drive and runs as a DRBD master, the machine B will be running with the minimalistic kernel and drbd and will be secondary.

- When machine A fails heartbeat sends a signal to machine B, On machine B using kexec we load the second kernel which was being replicated and now this becomes the primary.

This way OS patches applied will be replicated and shared across.

Is there any other way to do this (with XEN or any other software).

Thanks,
mKiranK