[DRBD-user] SAN, drbd, ha, shared disks, ataoe, iscsi, gnbd

Alex linux at vfemail.net
Mon Aug 11 12:09:19 CEST 2008

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


Hello experts,

I read that raid software on linux is not cluster aware, so i'm trying to find 
a solution to join together more computers to form a shared file system and 
build a SAN (correctly if i am wrong), avoiding usage of raid software.

Let say that I have:
- N computers (N>8) sharing their volumes (volX, where X=N). Each volX is 
arround 120GB.
- M servers (M>3) - which are accessing a GFS volume (read/write)
- Other regular computers which are available if required.

Now, I want:
- to build somehow a GFS on top of vol1, vol2, ... volN volumes with high data 
availability and without a single point of failure.
- resulted logical volume to be used on SERVER1, SERVER2 and SERVER3 
(read/write access)

So, how can i do that? Is that possible?

Can somebody suggest me an scenario regarding how to grup machines?

My scenario (before to start):

Step1. Grup computerX together, 2 by 2 using drbd and create network raid 1 
mirrors for each, in order to produce:

On computer1 and computer2:
- /dev/drbd0 (120GB size, contain vol1 <-> vol2 mirrored)
On computer3 and computer4:
- /dev/drbd1 (120GB size, contain vol3 <-> vol4 mirrored)
On computer5 and computer6:
- /dev/drbd2 (120GB size, contain vol5 <-> vol6 mirrored)
On computer7 and computer8:
- /dev/drbd3 (120GB size, contain vol7 <-> vol8 mirrored)

Does it mean that will result 4 CLUSTERS (4 different cluster.conf files). Is 
that correct? If yes, how can i join together resulted volumes /dev/drbd*?

Will be ok to export resulted /dev/drbd* volumes using ataoe (iscsi or gnbd) 
to our SERVERS and after that, on SERVER1 for example, to manipulate and join 
imported volumes (/dev/import0, /dev/import1, /dev/import2, /dev/import3) 
using clvm like on the next step below?

Step2. On SERVER1, join resulted volumes together using lvm and create a 
logical volume (480GB)
pvcreate /dev/import0 /dev/import1 /dev/import2 /dev/import3
vgcreate myvg ...
lvcreate mylvm ...

Now, mylvm is grouping import0 up to import4 in one logical volume which is in 
fact drbd0+drbd1+drbd2+drbd3.

What will be if at this stage, will not be available any fencing? I know that 
GFS require fencing in all circumstances.

How can be implemented fencing? ATAoE and ISCSI does not provide any builtin 
fencing mechanism, so, maybe GNBD sould be used to export /dev/drbd* (because 
it has fencing builtin). Is that correct? Is possible? If, yes, should i 
create only one cluster grouping:
- all N computers together
or
- all N computers plus our 3 SERVERS together?

Step3. format /dev/myvg/mylv using GFS:
mkfs.gfs -p lock_dlm -t cluster:data -j 3 /dev/myvg/mylv

Step4. Create other cluster containing only 3 nodes (SERVER1 up to SERVER3) 
which will mount and use resulted shared GFS volume:

mount /dev/myvg/mylv /var/www/data on all our servers.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Alx



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