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Draft: Introduce guidance on matching OS and OS version when setting up Geo

Brie Carranza requested to merge bcarranza-geo-os-matching-docs into master

What does this MR do and why?

What

This MR updates the requirements for running Geo section of the Geo administration docs to clarify that the same OS and OS version should be used on the primary and all secondary nodes in a Geo environment.

Why

In chatting with @abuerer (a Geo SME within Support): we agreed that we expected the advice about matching operating systems to be present. This is not purely academic.

GitLab team members with access to Zendesk can review this ticket 🎫 where the root cause of 502 errors and severe performance degradation was traced to a difference in glibc due to differing OS versions. The difference in glibc versions.

Some notes on how we tested that:

  • Observed that the results of ( echo "1-1"; echo "11" ) | LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 sort differed between nodes. This confirmed that collation has changed, was unexpected and addressing it resolved the problem. See https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes.
  • In that case on node was running a release of RHEL and the other was running a release of Ubuntu.

❓ Questions

  • Should this guidance be a "soft recommendation" or a "hard requirement"?
    • I think it would be best to make it a hard requirement. There may be arguments in support of making this a soft recommendation that I am not aware of.
    • See the conversation on this question.

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Edited by Brie Carranza

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