[DRBD-user] configuring 2 services on 2 hosts

Digimer linux at alteeve.com
Thu Jan 6 14:46:20 CET 2011

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


On 01/06/2011 03:27 AM, Felix Frank wrote:
>> In any case, be sure to have (at least) RAID 1 on each node backing the
>> DRBD devices to help minimize downtime. Drives fail fairly frequently...
>> software RAID 1 is an inexpensive route to much better uptime. :)
> 
> If the budget isn't severely restricted, I'd also throw in an actual
> RAID controller, software RAID being an unnecessary pain.
> 
> Cheers,
> Felix

If I may provide a counter-point arguing in favour of software RAID;

With hardware RAID, you array and your data is bound to that controller.
Should the controller fail at some point, you will find yourself
scrambling trying to find a compatible controller, and you will be down
until you do (shy of falling back to recovering from backup). I had this
happen to me enough that I now won't use hardware RAID unless it's for
performance (or similar) reasons the make software RAID unfeasible.

With software RAID, you have a familiar set of tools (mdadm) that many
people can help you with. More importantly though, you can move your
array to almost any other machine and get it up and running again with
relatively little effort, potentially dramatically reducing your mean
time to recovery.

Cheers!

-- 
Digimer
E-Mail: digimer at alteeve.com
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