[DRBD-user] Re: cluster configuration question

Nicolas Ouedraogo nicolas at tdn-services.ch
Fri Jul 7 19:09:43 CEST 2006

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


Hi!

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 10:19:10AM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm wrestling with possible configurations for a 2-node, high
> availability cluster.
>
> What I seem to be zeroing in on is:
> - using Xen to provide several virtual servers on each box
> - using md to raid together the disks on each server
> - using DRBD to mirror the primary machine to the backup server
> - using EVMS to manage partitions and such
> - maybe using SSI to provide a single interface to the world for each
> pair of virtual servers
>
> Anybody have any experience with this kind of setup? Any suggestions,
> pointers to recipes, etc.?
>
> Thanks much,
>
> Miles Fidelman


We've been setting up something like this here for the past few months, it is 
still in tests however...

Here's our setup so far:
- 2x "disk servers" running heartbeatv2, EVMS, DRBD 0.8 in primary/primary, 
and iSCSI-target.
these machines serve only as disk exporters via iSCSI, and are mirrored 
between each other via DRBD

- 3x (for now) "xen servers" running heartbeat, EVMS, iSCSI-initiator, 
multipath and of course, xen domUs.

all EVMS partitions are visible on all "xen servers", allowing us to migrate 
domUs.

We are begining to test the failover capabilities of the setup, in case of 
troubles we might revert to a more classic primary/secondary setup on the 
"disk servers".

Once done, we'll focus on an SSI setup for the xen servers.

We chose EVMS instead of LVM because it integrates well with heartbeat, and
because we can easily manage volumes with a GUI.
To further ease management, we decided to stack EVMS on top of DRBD, allowing 
us to easily add space to the EVMS volumes by simply setting up another drbd 
resource (so we have very little to configure by hand in drbd).

Hope that helps,
-- 
Nicolas Ouedraogo
Directeur
TDN Services
rue Michel-Chauvet 3
1208 Genève
Switzerland
http://www.tdn-services.ch
tel.: +41 (22) 328-2627
fax.: +41 (22) 328-2626
email: nicolas at tdn-services.ch



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