[Linux-cluster] RFI quick HOWTO
Christopher McCrory
chrismcc at gmail.com
Sun Jun 27 19:23:08 UTC 2004
On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 11:31, John Hearns wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 18:42, Christopher McCrory wrote:
> > Hello...
> >
> > Last year I looked at several distributed filesystems; OpenAFS, GFS,
> > and NFS. This was for a specific project. I settled on NFS over LVM
> > over software raid5. It works well except for a few NFS issues here
> > and there. I really wanted to go with GFS but the lack of good
> > documentation held me back. What would be ideal is a specific simple
> > HOWTO on setting up a simple lab test setup.
> >
> > something like:
> >
> > replicated with failover
> > server1 fs /important_data on /dev/sdb1
> > server2 fs /important_data on /dev/sdb1
> >
> > client1 mount /important_data
> > client2 mount /important_data
> >
> > with no FC, no shared scsi, no dual ethernet networks. Just the
> > minimum hardware possible. Most labs already have this stuff laying
> > around.
>
> For that sort of thing, IMHO you should be looking at Linux-HA
> http://www.linux-ha.org and using DRBD as the shared storage.
>
> I've used Linux-HA for a failover cluster, using shared SCSI and
> in another case using DRBD.
>
> If it really is failover you are after, look at the HOWTOs and the
> journal articles referenced on the Linux-HA pages.
> The minimal setup you will need is two servers, linked by a single
> Ethernet and a serial cable. The heartbeat can run over both the
> Ethernet and the serial link, giving you redundancy.
>
Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of testing GFS?
With a lab setup you could test:
does my app work well with this FS?
Is it faster? slower?
does my backup software work? can I restore!? ( I ran into this
with amanda, XFS (sgi) and differing RH versions. ) nice to know
_before_ you need it :)
any other gotchas?
then you have some answers before shelling out for more hardware ($$$)
--
Christopher McCrory
"The guy that keeps the servers running"
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