[DRBD-user] Expanding a cluster

Marcelo Pereira marcelops at gmail.com
Thu Jan 31 21:32:10 CET 2013

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


Hi Adam,

I'm sorry but it wasn't supposed to be an off-topic. I have been checking
all the phases of this process, and RAID is something I was checking as
well.

What I wanted to know was really the DRBD side, as I know that this
expansion will affect the block numbers and so on. That is why I wanted to
know if DRBD would handle it okay, and how!

Thanks ALL, for the messages! I will check the version numbers and publish
the results here. And I will RTM.

Thanks again,

--Marcelo

On 1/31/13 12:27 PM, "Adam Goryachev"
<mailinglists at websitemanagers.com.au> wrote:

>On 01/02/13 04:04, Justin Edmands wrote:
>> I'm on the fence about the amount of time it will take to degrade and
>> rebuild a RAID6 at 16 drives (x2 systems).
>> 
>> Anyone against the idea of:
>> Backup data friday night through saturday morning
>> stop drbd and heartbeat on node2
>> replace all drives on node2
>> build raid 6 and match setup/sizes from node1
>> initialize metadata, etc.
>> start drbd and heartbeat
>> let it sync
>> make node2 primary
>> repeat steps for node1
>
>In theory, the set of drives you pulled from the secondary are an extra
>backup.... you could put all those drives back in, and make that set the
>primary.... In some ways this might be a better solution, since you are
>then simply doing a single large read on the primary, and a large write
>on the secondary.... no raid rebuilds, except for the initial resync on
>the secondary (which you might be able to skip since you know you will
>write to every sector very soon when drbd does the sync).
>
>1) Stop DRBD on secondary
>2) Pull all drives on secondary
>3) Add all drives on secondary and build new RAID6 array
>4) Enable DRBD on secondary
>5) sync from primary to secondary
>
>Danger of read errors on the primary during this sync, but I would guess
>this is better than doing 16 rebuild's
>
>Personally, I would try to set the primary read-only during the process
>(if an option) so that the "spare" set of drives is an exact match to
>the primary (ie, they don't get outdated).
>
>Depends on how much downtime can be scheduled....
>
>Finally, I think you have a fairly high risk with 16 drives in a single
>RAID6, you might consider 2 sets of 8 drives in RAID6, and do a linear
>concat of the two sets (or raid0). That allows you to lose any 2 out of
>8 drives, instead of only 2 out of 16. Also, chances of URE on just one
>of the remaining 14 drives after a 2 drive failure is not a good risk I
>would want. Though depends on capacity requirements if you can use
>another 2 drives to ensure you don't lose the data.
>
>Just my 0.02c worth....
>
>At the end of the day, the direct answer to the original question was
>RTFM, it really is a very nice manual, and you didn't tell us what
>version of DRBD you use. The rest is really off-topic for this list,
>maybe discuss on the linux-raid list if you are interested.
>
>Regards,
>Adam
>
>> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Adam Goryachev
>> <mailinglists at websitemanagers.com.au
>> <mailto:mailinglists at websitemanagers.com.au>> wrote:
>> 
>>     On 01/02/13 02:58, Marcelo Pereira wrote:
>>>     Hello Everyone,
>>>
>>>     I'm about to perform an upgrade on my servers and I was wondering
>>>     how to do that.
>>>
>>>     Here is the scenario:
>>>
>>>     Server A has 16x 1Tb hard drives, under RAID-6.
>>>     Server B has 16x 1Tb hard drives, under RAID-6.
>>>
>>>     And both are in sync, using DRBD.
>>>
>>>     I though about replacing the hard drives for 2Tb units, one by one.
>>>
>>>     So, on each run, I would:
>>>
>>>       * Remove a 1Tb disk
>>>       * Add a 2Tb disk
>>>       * Wait for it to rebuild the RAID
>>>
>>>     After replacing ALL disks, I would expand the RAID unit, on each
>>>     server.
>>>
>>>     However, I was wondering how DRBD would "like" this procedure.
>>>
>>>     I know that, before "expanding" the RAID, the cluster size, and
>>>     the block numbers would remain the same, as I would be "wasting"
>>>     the extra space on the newly added drives.
>>>
>>>     So, after "both" servers have all the drives replaces, and the
>>>     RAID is properly rebuild. Would that be a problem to expand it?
>>>     How would DRBD handle it?
>>>
>>>     I will appreciate any comment or suggestion here.
>>     DRBD will work perfectly...
>> 
>>     You probably need to do the following:
>>     1) Pull one drive and replace (you could do one on each server at
>>     the same time, although better/safer to do one server at a time)
>>     2) Wait for rebuild to complete
>>     3) Repeat for all disks on BOTH servers
>>     4) Resize the RAID array on each server
>>     5) Resize DRBD (see the fantastic online manual for your version of
>>     DRBD for the details)
>>     6) Resize the underlying filesystem or whatever
>> 
>>     BTW, depending on your kernel version, and/or RAID (I'm assuming
>>     linux software raid), you might like to query the linux-raid list to
>>     see if you can ADD the new drive, tell md that this new drive is
>>     replacing drive X, this way you avoid degrading the RAID array,
>>     hence lose less performance during the rebuild, and have a lower
>>     risk of disk failure and especially URE (Unrecoverable Read Error)
>>     during the rebuilds.
>> 
>>     Regards,
>>     Adam
>> 
>> 
>>     -- 
>>     Adam Goryachev
>>     Website Managers
>>     www.websitemanagers.com.au <http://www.websitemanagers.com.au>
>> 
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>
>
>-- 
>Adam Goryachev
>Website Managers
>www.websitemanagers.com.au
>_______________________________________________
>drbd-user mailing list
>drbd-user at lists.linbit.com
>http://lists.linbit.com/mailman/listinfo/drbd-user





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