[DRBD-user] DRBD with CentOS in Production?

Brian Candler b.candler at pobox.com
Wed Aug 14 17:37:21 CEST 2013

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


On 14/08/2013 15:58, Christian Völker wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm planning to use DRBD in a production environment. I prefer to use
> CentOS as base system.
>
> The reason to use drbd is the synchronisation, not the high availability.
> We'll have two locations connected through a 100Mbit line. On both
> locations users will access the data at the same time. So I know I have
> to use a cluster aware filesystem.
You mean, you are planning to use DRBD in dual-master mode??

Why not just have all the accesses go to one master node in one data 
centre? Then you can use a regular filesystem, with something like NFS 
on top, and you can still replicate to a slave.

Perhaps you expecting a very read-heavy workload, and you want all reads 
to take place from the nearer copy? Using DRBD + dual master + GFS is a 
risky way of achieving this, and as the GFS nodes will have to 
communicate to grab locks anyway, it may not have much better latency 
than the simple case.
> Which filesystem is recommended? GFS? ZFS (experimental?)?
Apples and oranges. GFS and OCFS2 are cluster-aware filesystems which 
you may be able to use in a multi-master scenario - if you are braver 
than me. ZFS is a standard filesystem which you could only use in a 
single-master setup. The Linux ZFS port is also a somewhat risky option; 
if you want to use ZFS I'd suggest FreeBSD (or a FreeBSD-based appliance 
like FreeNAS)

Regards,

Brian.




More information about the drbd-user mailing list