[DRBD-user] DRBD Alternatives (Apples vs. Apples)

Nick Khamis symack at gmail.com
Sun Oct 30 16:41:14 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.


Hello Pascal,

Thank you so much for your response. The reason that I am looking for
alternatives is
not because I have lost faith in DRBD for production. If all I present
to my superiors is
one solution, then I have failed as a researcher. I am closely
examining everyone's
experiences such that:


"Then, the IET that guy makes use of has some known lacks, in terms of
performance as
well as functionality, especially in the virtualization area (I faced
a couple of problems with
round-robin accesses under VMware for instance). I'm surprised that he
doesn't know them
and don't propose something more serious like SCST. If then you chose
NFS to export your
datas, it's very likely that you will lose important features such as
VMware Thin Provisionning, or
should I say, you will use it but it won't save any space, too bad..."

I have read on this issue! That is why we will be going with the SCST
route right from the beginning.
THANK YOU so much for sharing your experience!

"Also, my understanding was that ZFS was under FreeBSD licensing and as far
as I know there was nothing available for our common GNU distributions, I'm
surprised to see that it has changed, may be the Oracle effect. If so, that
might be of interest, but in that case nothing prevents you from using ZFS
with DRBD, right ?"

Exactly! we have been prototyping using OCFS2, maybe it's worth
looking at ZFS as well.

"There are tons of DRBD clusters experience available everywhere, an
official support, you
have very few for Glusterfs to what I can see. You have tons of
references implementing DRBD
and Pacemaker. How many companies do you know implementing this Glusterfs ?"

Very true!

"DRBD and Pacemaker stuffs are effectively a bit complex, but clusterizing
data access IS a complex (And sensible!) task by nature, and you get nothing
for nothing. I think that the best advice I may give you is spend the time
it requires to master these products, you won't regret it!"

It's a small price to pay for a piece of mind. If that piece of mind
does not wake
you up every night becuase the VMs are all down ;). I have spend two months
working with the pcmk stack and DRBD. I almost have our configuration completed,
and will be posting them to the list to make sure we have a clear understanding,
as much as possible.

" I prefer suffering a bit and trusting my datas rather than trusting
something that
looks so simple and smart, and then having to explain my customers that
their datas are definitely gone... 20 years of IT made a prudent guy of me! :)"

I do get a sense of your knowledge Pascal.

The goal is to replicate 4TB disk arrays that  VMWare host use. Supporting
things like live migrations, SR-IOV, pci pass through of raid
controllers, and other
devices. What I have come up with is the use of SCST with DRBD on the PCMK
stack. It seems like a more than capable solution. It's my first
contract for such a
large company, and I am just trying to make sure that do not have a big mess on
my hands.

Everything is thought about carefully, hardware that support IOMMU, and SR-IOV,
disk replication appliances etc... I am almost there, just taking a
step back and
looking at the bigger picture.

Kindest Regards,

Nick from Toronto (And sometimes Montreal ;)



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