[Linux-cluster] Sanity Check

[Brian D. Haymore]

I tried to send this yesterday but didn't see it on the list yet so I 
apologize if this ends up being a duplicate.




We have been starting to play with Cluster Suite as part of RHEL over 
the past week.  Our needs, we think, are pretty basic.  However we have 
not found enough information in the docs to help validate our plans as 
being sane.  So for that I'm turning to the list in hopes someone can help.

What we are trying to do is simply have 3 servers attached to a SAN with 
common disk storage.  By common storage I simply mean the SAN is zoned 
so that all three servers can see this common storage.  We then want to 
lvm, cluster lvm flag enabled, this storage such that we can create many 
logical volumes.  Each of those LVs would have an ext3 file system on 
it, implying only one server at a time will mount and use it.  Then we 
can take the N LVs and distribute them out between the three servers in 
a very fixed fashion.

So thus far we see that we need to have CMAN running as well as have 
lvm2-cluster installed and having run `lvmconf --enable-cluster`.  Then 
from system-config-lvm we created a cluster of our 3 servers.  We think 
that is about all we need to do for this very crude initial setup.  This 
is where we wanted to get some feedback if in fact this is an 
acceptable, while overly basic, configuration.  Could someone offer any 
feedback here?

We do realize that we are ignoring many of the key features of the 
cluster setup where we could define these LVs and their file systems as 
resourced as well as the services using them and have cman, rgmanager, 
etc help build a more robust and polished setup.  We are in a time 
crunch for now and need to get an initial setup going thus the above 
question, then with time we hope to learn the other parts of the system 
and then migrate things in a better direction.  Thanks for your time.


-- 
Brian D. Haymore
University of Utah
Center for High Performance Computing
155 South 1452 East RM 405
Salt Lake City, Ut 84112-0190
Phone: (801) 558-1150, Fax: (801) 585-5366
http://www.map.utah.edu/umaplink/0019.html