[DRBD-user] Setup Primary system now, Secondary Later

[David Coulson]

On 8/18/11 7:15 AM, Gerald Brandt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Would it be possible to setup a DRBD system, with the primary being setup now (with heartbeat/pacemaker), and setting up the secondary a few months from now?
I have a system running like this - You will need to invest some time 
(and downtime) to implement the second node in order to have time to 
test STONITH and other two-node features you can't do much with when 
you've only got one box.
>
> I understand there may be a lengthly sync period, but what are the other drawbacks/issues I'll run into?
Assuming you have protected disk under DRBD and reliability is not an 
issue, running stand-alone DRBD is not a big deal - You might want to 
tweak the configs so when it comes up it does not wait forever for the 
second node (at least with the RedHat/Centos RPMs I've used, the default 
timeout is 0).

The sync time is not a big deal - Both nodes can access the data while 
it is syncing, and you can rate limit it so it'll not impact your 
production IO very much.

David