[Pvfs2-users] PVFS and DRBD

[Phil Carns]

PVFS may not quite be the right thing for what you are trying to do. 
There is no windows compatibility (in case you need to keep your windows 
servers).  I also don't know of anyone who has actually tried using DRBD 
with PVFS, so we can't really vouch for how well that combination would 
perform.

The DRBD web page mentions OCFS2 and GFS specifically as cluster file 
systems that work with DRBD.  You may want to look into those first.

In addition to the software to share the block storage (DRDB) and the 
file system itself (PVFS, GFS, etc.) you may also need software to 
manage the failover process, such as heartbeat.  That setup will depend 
on your file system, though.

-Phil

Michael O'Sullivan wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am very new to storage networking. My research group (NDSG, 
> www.ndsg.net.nz) is using optimisation to automatically design storage 
> networks, but we need to get the right software, redundancy, clustering, 
> etc to make our designs work correctly.
> 
> Our current storage system is very simple. Two servers (HP Proliants 
> currently running Windows Server 2003 although it looks like we will ned 
> to change to Linux, we have support for CentOS) that access disks on two 
> storage devices using an ethernet core-edge network. The storage devices 
> are dual-core motherboards (running CentOS) with two 1 TB sata disks 
> each. We want the storage devices to be share the workload, to provide 
> redundancy for each other and to appear as a single (clustered) storage 
> system.
> 
> What I would like to do is as follows:
> 
> * Set up one DRBD node with disk 1 on (storage) device 1 as the primary 
> disk and disk 2 on device 2 as the secondary disk.
> * Set up another DRBD node with disk 1 on device 2 as the primary disk 
> and disk 2 on device 1 as the secondary disk.
> * Cluster the two DRBD nodes together using PVFS or something similar.
> 
> This means that if device 1 fails then device 2 will still contain all 
> the data for the system to keep functioning. If both devices are up and 
> running then device 1 will provide DRBD node 1 and device 2 will provide 
> DRBD node 2 and share the load of the storage system. I ws hoping 
> someone would be able to let me know if this is possible and, if so, 
> provide some pointers on how to get started.
> 
> Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Mike
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