[DRBD-user] Mirroring between NFS servers

Bernd Schubert bernd-schubert at gmx.de
Fri Oct 26 17:14:25 CEST 2007

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


On Friday 26 October 2007 16:43:20 Mark Watts wrote:
> On Friday 26 October 2007 15:32:07 Saqib Jang wrote:
> > Hi there,
> > I'm new to DRBD, have a quick question.
> >
> > Can DRBD be used for active/passive real-time replication
> > between NFS servers? By real-time, I'm refering to in-process
> > NFS client requests being affected but new NFS client requests
> > going to the passive NFS server?
>
> DRBD could be used as the backing store for an HA NFS pair, but I believe
> NFS clients would have to reconnect on fail-over since file-handle state is
> stored in memory, not on disk.

Huh, what gives you that idea? NFS up to NFSv3 ist stateless, there no 
filehandle stored at all. For failover you need to have the very same inode 
numbers and generation numbers, which is why you need shared storage such as 
drbd.

Saqib, your question is a bit strage, you want to have active/passive, but 
some clients shall connect to the passive server? I would name this 
active/active. I wouldn't want to do active/active with NFS, nfs is simply 
not designed for that purpose (besides that I have no idea how to set this 
up).

Cheers,
Bernd



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