Replicate Galera from MySQL 5.5 Master?

[IGGt]

Hi, we are currently investigating moving our current MySQL 5.5 Master > 3 x Slaves (with Statement Based Replication, apx 250GB data and growing) to a HA clustering option. We have ruled out MySQL ndb Cluster as it would require too many changes to our current database structure (large number of BLOB fields amongst others). 

We would want to start off by setting the Cluster up as a Slave to the main Master (for testing etc), before moving over to the Cluster as our Primary system in the future. Is this possible with Galera Cluster, and is it a relatively straight forward process? 

[Momin Rashid]

Yes, it is possible.  I recently moved our database from MySQL 5.6 to MariaDB-galera cluster using this technique.  It was simple and straight forward, and worked just like setting up a regular master-slave configuration.