Managing MySQL Server with systemd After modifying the systemd environment, restart the server to make the changes effective: For platforms that use systemd, the data directory is initialized if empty at server startup. This might be a problem if the data directory is a remote mount that has temporarily disappeared: The mount point would appear to be an empty data directory, which then would be initialized as a new data directory. To suppress this automatic initialization behavior, specify the following line in the  /etc/sysconfig/mysql  file (create the file if it does not exist): This section describes how to configure systemd for multiple instances of MySQL. Because systemd has the capability of managing multiple MySQL instances on platforms for which systemd support is installed,  mysqld_multi  and mysqld_multi.server  are unnecessary and are not installed. To use multiple-instance capability, modify the  my.cnf  option file to include configuration of key options for each instance. These file locations are typical: For example, to manage two instances named  replica01  and  replica02 , add something like this to the option file: RPM platforms: Debian platforms: The replica names shown here use  @  as the delimiter because that is the only delimiter supported by systemd. [mysqld@replica01] datadir=/var/lib/mysql-replica01 socket=/var/lib/mysql-replica01/mysql.sock port=3307 log-error=/var/log/mysqld-replica01.log [mysqld@replica02] datadir=/var/lib/mysql-replica02 socket=/var/lib/mysql-replica02/mysql.sock port=3308 log-error=/var/log/mysqld-replica02.log [mysqld@replica01] datadir=/var/lib/mysql-replica01 socket=/var/lib/mysql-replica01/mysql.sock port=3307 log-error=/var/log/mysql/replica01.log [mysqld@replica02] datadir=/var/lib/mysql-replica02 socket=/var/lib/mysql-replica02/mysql.sock port=3308 log-error=/var/log/mysql/replica02.log 200 • /etc/my.cnf  or  /etc/mysql/my.cnf  (RPM platforms) • /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf  (Debian platforms) Note Configuring Multiple MySQL Instances Using systemd systemctl restart mysqld # RPM platforms systemctl restart mysql # Debian platforms NO_INIT=true