Mike Fischer wrote:

Hello List,

this may be a little off-topic, but I value your opinions.

I'm running our company mailserver and webserver on a single host
machine using vservers. There have been problems in the past so I
am now faced with the tast of keeping the vital services redundant
across two machines to have a switchover in case of failure.

In numbers, this means I will have to synchronize 90 Gigs of Maildata and another 16 Gigs of vserver data (using SuSE, vunify was not an
option) over a direct 1GB link between the two machines.
I already copied the maildata, and it took just a few hours.

We're in the process of setting up drbd so we have can bring up a backup server for our vservers (well, fileserver that serves the vserver directories, close enough :)). So far I've been quite impressed with it. I remember looking at it a while back, and one thing that put me off at the time was the prospect of a full sync if the machines got out of sync. Since we're currently using it on a 500gig partition, with room to expand that beyond a terabyte, that was a real concern :)


drbd now does intelligent syncing, which so far is working well (I've been doing some moderately evil things to the machines to test failover, although I haven't simulated drive failure yet). I did notice a slight performance hit on writes, but nothing excessive.

In my personal experience I've found rsync memory usage starts escalating with large number of small files. It's also a bit more cpu intensive than drbd. This may or may not be a concern for you.

Hope that helps a bit.

-David
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