[DRBD-user] Building load-balancing SAN upon DRBD v0.8 and probably GFS or Lustre.

Igor Yu. Zhbanov bsg at uniyar.ac.ru
Sat Dec 2 00:01:26 CET 2006

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


On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Milind Dumbare wrote:

> On Friday 01 December 2006 10:33, Igor Yu. Zhbanov wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > Is it possible o build SAN with DRBD v0.8 and some (which one?) cluster
> > file system?
> yes.
> >
> > Suppose, we have two client nodes (which will access our SAN) and two
> > storage nodes. All nodes connectet by, suppose, gigabit ethernet. On
> > storage nodes we will run DRBD v0.8 in Primary/Primary mode, so we can
> > access to our hard drives on both nodes simultaneously to make load
> > balancing (at least for reading).
> >
> > Next, I think, we need to set up some clustered file system upon our DRBD
> > devices pair. Probably it will be GFS or Lustre (What is the best? Also,
> > I don't know is it possible to setup Lustre in Primary/Primary
> > configuration).
> Don't know about Lustre but yes you can setup GFS or OCFS. I have tried OCFS 
> it works fine. Is lustre, shared disk file system? If it is even it will 
> work.
> >
> > So, we can mount file system on both nodes. It's all ok. Both storage nodes
> > can mount file system and use it in parallel. But what about two our
> > clients nodes? Is it possible to mount GFS or Lustre or something else
> > remoutely? Or am I must to setup NFS (which nobody likes) on top of GFS?
> Yes that will be feasible. Setup NFS on top of GFS (cluster file system). It 
> should work.
> >
> > Please, tell me your suggestions, is it possible to build load-balancing
> > SAN with parallel access to each storage nodes and multiple clients nodes?
> multiple clients? See DRBD can work with only two nodes. But exporting the 
> Shared device to multiple clients should work.
> 
> > (And is it possible without exporting shared block device to All nodes
> > which want to access to shared file system? I think, network file system
> > trafic is much lesser than network block device trafic.)
> I didn't get you here. Will you explain in more detail here?

There are two possible way to export data from some storage to different node:
you can export it like some networking block device or you can export files
at file system level. And I think that exporting data at file system level
consumes much less network bandwidth because of lesser number of I/O operations
compared to block device.




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