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 ;)