"So then what is the purpose of this article? To let you setup a MySQL Cluster for fun, on a single box, so you can test out its features1. The main things I wanted to test out are:
"Setting up a cluster on one or two boxes. People tell me this is impossible. For personal and business reasons, this article attempts to squash those rumors so I can just point people to this article instead of explaining the details to them. There are advantages to setting up a cluster on 3 boxes as compared to 2 boxes, however. There is a difference between a network outage and a single server becoming unavailable and 3 servers help with this.
"Using other storage engines and setup dangerous replication between the frontend MySQL servers.
Replicating data to a cluster slave as well as a normal slave.
"There is also one important item to keep in mind about MySQL Cluster. I have no idea why they make "MySQL Cluster" as a separate product from the main MySQL server. In the past, the "MySQL Cluster" was just the NDB engine running in MySQL. It seems to be the same way even now and I suspect that it might just be due to politics and marketing that they have something called a "MySQL Cluster" when it is really just MySQL with the NDB engine. The mysqld server running in "MySQL Cluster" can still store data in InnoDB and MyISAM formats."
