[Linux-cluster] Sharing disk using gnbd

[Mark Wormgoor]

Hi,

I have a small network with 3 machines. All machines are FC5 as of 
yesterday. One machine is a server and has most of my storage. I'm 
currently sharing the disks using NFS, but am researching better ways of 
sharing my disks. My main reason for doing this is that I would like 
Posix semantics, but better performance over NFS would be a nice benefit.

I think my main options are gnbd (GFS), iscsi and ata-over-ethernet. 
Since GFS is best supported in Fedora, that was my first attempt. 
However, when going through the docs, I noticed that I could not mount 
the disk on the server itsself.
1. If you use GFS on the disk and mount it like that on the server, you 
have to share it using gnbd with nocache, which is a huge performance hit.
2. According to the gnbd docs, you should never import the disks on the 
machine they are exported on, so that's out as well.
Can this be true? Is gnbd unusable if you want to use the disk on the 
server? On the other hand, GFS is a bit overkill, since I don't need the 
clustering; I just want to share my disk.

However, for aoe and iscsi, I think there is no way of sharing the file 
system between multiple systems, which would make them unusable. 
Besides, I could not find rpms for aoe, and for iscsi I could only find 
the server rpm, not the client.

Is there a solution? Am I stuck with NFS?

Kind regards,

Mark