[DRBD-user] Best practices for DRBD in a VMware environment?

Lars Kellogg-Stedman lars at seas.harvard.edu
Mon Sep 22 17:29:17 CEST 2008

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


Hello all,

We're using DRBD and Heartbeat to provide filesystem replication and  
failover in a VMware environment.  Heartbeat seems ill-suited to this  
environment, since there aren't many options for alternate  
communication paths (e.g., no serial connectivity), so no dopd.  A  
network interruption invariably ends up with DRBD in a split-brain  
situation, which means that failovers stemming from connectivity loss  
require manual intervention.  From my perspective, there are obvious  
solutions:

- Quorum disks.  This would work great, since we have shared storage,  
but this is tragically not implemented by heartbeat.

- STONITH via VMware.  This might work, but the vmware-vi STONITH  
module distributed with VMware is non-functional.

What are other folks doing?  Automatic split-brain recovery is  
probably our best option in the short term, but is anyone doing  
something more reliable?  What about "cman" and the associated tools  
-- I understand that this has support for quorum disks.  Does this  
offer a similar feature set to Hearbeat?

Thanks for your input,

-- Lars




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