Quote
Stewart Smith
Note that you can have a mysql client application on windows accessing a mysql server on linux that is clustered. so your applications can exist on windows fine and still access a MySQL Cluster.
I can attest to this myself; I have PHP apps running on a Windows 2000 machine that access a MySQL Server running on a Linux machine that's part of a MySQL Cluster (4 other Linux machines).
Given that you'll need *dedicated* machines on which to run the data nodes ("Dedicated" = "You should not run any other apps on a Cluster data node host"), it oughtn't matter to the rest of your application what OS they use. MySQL and MySQL Cluster software does not have any special requirements as regards the operating system - a minimal installation of the OS is all you need, and there are plenty of Linux distributions (e.g. SuSE, RHEL, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, etc.) that practically install themselves.
I've adapted one of the diagrams from the Manual to try to make things a little clearer for you guys, and posted it here:
http://www.hiveminds.net/jon/images/web/cluster-components-2.png
Hope this helps.
Jon Stephens
MySQL Documentation Team @ Oracle
MySQL Dev Zone
MySQL Server Documentation
Oracle
