[Drbd-dev] SCTP support for drbd

[Lars Marowsky-Bree]

Hi all,

Florian asked me to post this to the list.

As you know, OpenAIS/corosync supports, similar to but slightly more
broken than heartbeat, redundant rings to provide redundant networking.

On SLE HA 11 GA, we recommended that customers not use this, but instead
use bonded NICs. This was not just because of the limitations in
OpenAIS, but also because of the limitations of the services we consider
essential.

The DLM, for example, was not able to take automatic advantage of the
redundant links - SCTP support was a bit flakey then. This is changed
(the kernel DLM already supports SCTP, and the patch for automatic
enablement in libdlm is bound to be done in a few days).

The other service is drbd, which also uses TCP-only right now. It'd be
nice if it also supported SCTP; it can't be that hard, since the
in-kernel dlm also supports TCP and SCTP.


As a further consideration, I'd like to point out how cool it'd be if
drbd could also, like the DLM, default to gathering its network
information from the OpenAIS/corosync layer (perhaps via a
drbd_controld); the peers could auto-detect each other based on the
UUID/label of the drbd instance being activated.  It'd reduce the need
to duplicate information between configuration files for the most common
scenarios.

(This would also be an extremely convenient and even neater way for
floating peers.)


Regards,
    Lars

-- 
Architect Storage/HA, OPS Engineering, Novell, Inc.
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde