G2

Suhail C.

System Administrator

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

4/29/2026

"Multi-Master Galera Cluster with Fast, Reliable Failover"

4/5

What do you like best about Galera Cluster?

What I like most about Galera Cluster is the multi master setup, it’s just a lot easier to manage compared to the master slave approach we used before. We are currently running it with 3 DB nodes and it handles failover pretty well, so even if one node goes down the others keep working.

We were using a similar setup earlier on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and now on Rocky, and it’s been pretty consistent. Replication is fast and data stays in sync across nodes without much delay, which is really important for us.

There were some issues at one point where a node kept failing repeatedly, and it took some time to figure out what was going wrong. Debugging that wasn’t very straightforward. But once it was fixed, things have been stable. Overall it’s been working well for our setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Galera Cluster?

One thing I don’t like about Galera Cluster is that troubleshooting can get a bit tricky when something goes wrong. We had a situation where one node kept failing repeatedly, and it wasn’t very obvious what the root cause was. It took some time digging through logs and testing to finally fix it.

Also, the initial setup and configuration is not the most straightforward, especially if you are coming from a simpler master slave setup. There are quite a few things you need to get right for it to work properly.

Once it’s stable it’s fine, but getting there can take some effort, and debugging issues is probably the most frustrating part. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Galera Cluster solving and how is that benefiting you?

For us Galera Cluster mainly solves the problem of database availability and failover. Earlier with master slave setups, if the main node had an issue, it needed manual intervention, which was not ideal. With Galera and the multi master setup, all nodes are active, so there’s no single point of failure.

We are running it with 3 nodes now, so even if one node goes down, the others keep handling queries without much impact. That makes things a lot more reliable for day to day operations.

It also helps with keeping data consistent across all nodes in near real time, so we don’t have to worry much about sync delays. Overall it just reduces downtime and makes the whole database layer more stable, even though it takes a bit more effort to manage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.