DRBD stuff
Today I found the time to write a documentation (in German language for our work) about DRBD, a network (block device) based RAID 1 system. My target is finding a way to use normal LVM based devices and DRBD based devices in synergy on one host. Why? We have the requirement to build some containers fail save but not all. This means that we have an important central Apache based load balancer an some Tomcat based application server which we like to be online mirrored to another OpenVZ hardware node and if it is possible we will try to mirror over WAN from Austria to Germany.
I guess we will update the existing DRBD-OpenVZ wiki page which is a little bit outdated. Maybe I think we will contact Werner Fischer who we knew from the LinuxTag09 and who is the author of the wiki page.
In fact I learned a lot today and I also tested some scenarios (split brain, switch over,…) that make me think positive that it could work.
Stay tuned because I will post the translated documentation (German -> English) from our workplace at http://systec.blogsite.org/wiki.
Mario
August 12th, 2009 at 11:01
Hi Mario,
I came across your blog via your entry at the OpenVZ livejournal. Very nice to read that you are planning to use DRBD! Unfortunately the DRBD&Heartbeat howto in the OpenVZ wiki is really old, as I didn’t take the time yet to update it.
It’s really cool that you plan to update the Howto. As the heartbeat part is very outdated, too (just look at http://www.clusterlabs.org for current information on the cluster/ressource manager) it would maybe be an idea to write the new Howto from scratch and perhaps keep the old one with a hint that it refers to outdated versions (and place a link to the new howto).
If you have any questions, just drop me an email.
Regarding DRBD, here are some nice sites with infos on DRBD:
http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/
http://blogs.linbit.com/florian
http://twitter.com/linbit_drbd
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/862072/focus=867540 (DRBD seems to get soon included into mainline)
best regards,
Werner
August 16th, 2009 at 16:12
Hi Werner,
Nice to hear from you! Yes I am currently implementing DRBD at work. I think it will be another facet of DRBD usage because I would like to use it in at hot-hot setup. Thanks for the offer to contact you, I think I will drop you a mail once the article is ready.
Also best regards!
Mario
August 16th, 2009 at 16:26
[...] thanks to Werner Fischer who leaves a comment (here)! We become acquainted with him at the LinuxTAG 09 in Berlin and have a lot of [...]