[Linux-cluster] No storage cluster configuration

[Lon Hohberger]

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 15:37 -0400, Lon Hohberger wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 07:42 -0300, Celso K. Webber wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > Does anyone from Red Hat would tell me if Red Hat supports a no external 
> > storage environment when using RH Cluster Suite 
> 
> Yes...
> 
> > and DRDB for replicating 
> > data beetween cluster nodes?
> 
> No.
> 
> > When customers come to us arguing that IBM is offering SuSE Cluster 
> > solutions without the need of an external storage, we usually tell them 
> > to go on if they don't value their data. IBM on its turn tells that DRDB 
> > is stable enough for production, even when using Oracle database on top 
> > of it.
> 
> There is, or was, some deep-seated hatred between some of our elite
> engineers and DRBD, but I don't remember what it was.  It's not part of
> the kernel.
> 
> > We have lost some projects because of this "magical solution" of using 
> > DRDB instead of an external storage, but we are still against deploying 
> > production cluster solutions using DRDB or similar solutions.
> 
> We don't ship DRBD.  If that changes, we can certainly support it.  In
> fact, people from the community have asked about it, too.  Eventually,
> we may have to add support for it to our upstream linux-cluster project,
> even if Red Hat never ships it - mostly due to its simplicity to
> configure, and ease of use in failover environments.

Sidenote - if anyone wants to try the DRBD device script (resource
agent) from the Linux-HA pool on linux-cluster, it "should" work with
little or no modifications.  Linux-HA and linux-cluster use a similar
script for resources.

Note, however, that the stable version of DRBD is not suitable for use
with GFS (GFS requires multiple concurrent writers).  Recently, someone
pointed out that the development version of DRBD allows concurrent
writes from both nodes, which would then make it suitable for use with
GFS.

Whether or not Red Hat picks it up is another question, which I can't
really answer :)

-- Lon