Hi J. Ryan,

thanks for your answers! As you may have already guessed, I'm quite new to the
whole HA topic and I'm sorry if my request sounded amateurish; well, that's
what I'm trying to overcome by asking questions here to learn.

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 02:50:05PM -0500, J. Ryan Earl wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Manuel Prinz <[email protected]>wrote:
> > A short introduction: I have two RAID arrays which I'd like to join via
> > LVM (as PVs) and replicate them via DRBD.
> 
> 2 RAID arrays *per host* you mean?  How are your RAID arrays configured?

Yes, sorry for being unclear. Each host has two RAID-6 arrays configured.
That's far from optimal, sure. It's a limitation of the controller. (The only
other option I see would be to use JBOD + software RAID altogether. But that's
off-topic. I don't mind if you share your thoughts on that, though.)

> I recommend:
> 
> C. Create an software RAID0 'md' device between your two array controllers.
> Use the md device as your backing storage.  Put LVM on top of the final
> DRBD device.

That sounds pretty clever!

> "CLVM" and "LVM" with locking_type=3 are pretty much the same thing.  For
> locking_type=3 to be used, the clvmd service needs to be running but yea,
> changing the locking type to 3 is what turns LVM into CLVM.
> […]
> Or later modify the VG to be clustered.  The VG must be clustered, which
> means all the RHCS cluster infrastructure must be running including clvmd.

Thanks for clarifying!

> Fencing is required for cman and thus CLVM and GFS2.  Not sure why you think
> there should be no concurrent access issues, there are.

I was confused since STONITH is disabled in a lot of examples, including in
mentioned white paper (which uses OCFS2). Expecting people writing about that
topic to know what they are doing might have been a bit naive, as it appears.
Of course you're right, there could be issues below the FS layer, so fencing
is always a good idea. At least that's what I got from your statement. Got it
right?

> GFS2 is an enterprise ready, stable, proven, robust clustered filesystem
> with OK performance.  I'd definitely say OCFS2 of 1.2.x and earlier did not
> qualify as that.  There were/are outstanding bugs open for years.  I haven't
> done any work with OCFS2-1.4.x which was released a few months ago.  How
> about you go bleeding edge and let us all know if you're willing to do the
> leg work and/or take the risk. :-)

If going with OCFS2, I was going to use 1.4.4 anyway, as that's provided by
my distribution of choice. Since I do not have spare hardware for testing,
I've to decide for on or the other. I already tend to go with OCFS2, so yeah,
maybe you'll hear me screaming soon at this very place! ;)

> Now you're in a different land.  I thought you were talking about putting a
> clustered file-system on your DRBD nodes.

I'm not sure if you're trying to tell me that this is off-topic for this list
or that's some kind of insane in a way I do not see. If I have a clustered FS
on DRBD nodes, someone should put data there, right? So exporting the storage
via iSCSI seemed to be a (reasonable?) option to accomplish that. If it's
off-topic here I'd very much appreciate it if you could point me to a better
forum!

Again, thanks for your answers!

Best regards,
Manuel
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