[Linux-cluster] Sharedroot or shared GFS? Flash Boot

[Mark Hlawatschek]

> First, sharedroot and shared GFS space aren't the same, this I know.
> However, could GFS be used as a shared root for multiple servers which are
> identical? They all do the same things, they are all configured identically
> except for their IP. So, why could they not all boot off of one single GFS
> partition?
Yes, you can do this. 
That's why http://www.open-sharedroot.org/ originally has been created.
But it can do a lot more.
E.g. you can also create clusters from servers with different hardware setup, 
as fibre channel and network hbas will be automatically detected during the 
initrd bootsequence.
You can assign different root partitions for the cluster nodes. I.e. a cluster 
can have multiple root partitions and servers can be booted into different 
sub-clusters on demand. (e.g. a php cluster node can be booted as a database 
cluster node on demand)
 
> Second, I have 32 volumes on a storage device. I have a flash drive for the
> /boot partition only. The system boots off of the lash card then uses one
> of the volumes as it's own OS swap and root partitions. Rather than
> installing over and over again, is there some way of making a copy of one
> of the volumes and using that to mirror the rest? Then I'd only need to
> modify the grub.conf file to tell each blade what it's volume disk is.

open-sharedroot has a sub project called comoonics-enterprisecopy. With this 
software you can create bootable clones from either single node 
configurations or sharedroot clusters. 
They can be used to create identical bootable shadow installations, perform 
regular backups (right now tar files and legato networker client have beed 
integrated) or to deploy new single node servers or sharedroot clusters.

Mark 


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