<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi all , I am testing RHCS "Active - Passive " on RHEL 5.5 64 bit OS along with VMWARE ESX 4.0 for mailing application . I want suggestion and guidance that , what should be the best architecture and best practice for the below mention setup. My architecture details are as follows :-- ------------------------------------ 1) I have one VM called "node1" under one physical VMWARE server. 2) second VM called "node2" under second physical VMWARE server. 3) Both the physical servers are connected to each other with switch along with NIC teaming and fail over switch is also available. 4) For fencing I am using fencedevice agent as "fence_vmware" 5) one SAN partition with LVM configure. User's mailbox data is inside this SAN partition. 6) File system is "EXT3" My queries :--- ========= 1) Is above architecture's points from 1-6 are correct for Active-passive configuration with VMWARE. ? 2) While testing I observer that when I purposely stop the network service on active "node1" then "node2" fence the "node1" properly. But "node1" getting fence by "poweroff" . Since all service was running on "node1" and SAN partition was also mounted and suddenly "node1" get fence. So will this immediate poweroff cause the corruption of SAN ext3 file system and local HDD too ? 3) If yes how to avoid this ? 4) Is it a correct way of fencing ? 5) Is this correct setup for production environment ? I purposely stop network service on "node1" because I want to test and know that , what will happen when network goes down on "node1" . I also observe that the files which was open in VIM editor also got recover properly because of the Journaling feature of EXT3 FS. Happy christmas. Thanks & Regards Jayesh Shinde </body> </html>