>AVS is filesystem, database and application agnostic. AVS has no 
>real knowledge that the volumes being replicated are in use, which 
>is why AVS can replicate UFS, QFS, ZFS, single node Oracle, Sybase 
>and other Solaris supported data services.

I'm not sure how your points relate to the points I'm raising. For 
example, DRBD is also filesystem, database and application agnostic. 
In fact, DRBD depends on that design to replicate any block-based 
Linux filesystem, even ZFS running on Linux FUSE.

DRBD does have knowledge that the volumes being replicated are in 
use. It sits under the filesystem so that it can intercept I/O and 
redirect it to other system and vice versa if the primary system has 
failed.

AVS seems to have this ability as well according to page 60 of the 
administration guide, which describes its ability to substitute the 
secondary's volumes for the primary one, so it must have this 
knowledge as well.

>This relationship between AVS and the data service it is 
>replicating, is unfortunately left to those that choose to deploy 
>AVS. AVS is a technology, to be used in combination with other data 
>services, as AVS by itself is not a solution.

I don't see what an admin could do to control its behavior. What 
facility can make it change the designation of primary and secondary 
on the fly? This is trivial to do in DRBD. In fact, high availability 
in Linux essentially depends on it.

To me, the real difference was the conscious, design decision to have 
AVS rigged to consider the primary and secondary as fixed 
designations and to assume that admins will always want replication 
in one direction. Perhaps, in the future, you'll consider 
reevaluating this approach.

That being said, I'm wondering whether I've identified three bugs in 
AVS. It doesn't make sense to me in any circumstance that turning on 
autosync on the primary should not be a state shared by the 
secondary, that it must be turned on both systems, and that switching 
to logging mode should cause the state of autosync to be misreported 
as off (it can't, of course, autosync in this mode, but that's an 
action [autosynchronizing], not a property) or that the output of 
dsstat on the two systems should ever disagree.
-- 

Maurice Volaski, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Computing Support, Rose F. Kennedy Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University
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