RE: [Xen-users] question to DRBD users/experts

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> We're looking at using xen on SLES11SP1 servers in production at
remote
> sites. We've been testing ocfs2 over dual primary drbd as one of the
> storage choices. It runs great, and is certainly more cost affective
> than putting SANs at our sites.
> 
> Our big concern is split brain and how to handle that when it happens.
> If you have a large, shared storage over drbd with VMs running on
either
> host, how do you handle a split brain situation from a recovery
> standpoint?
> 
> One idea we had is to run multiple ocfs2/drbd's, one for each VM, and
we
> can pick and choose which way to recover in a split brain. That seems
> like it makes it a lot more complex and not sure how successful it
would
> even be.
> 
> Are others using drbd in production?
> What has been your experience?
> 
> Any suggestions are appreciated. Our company standard is SLES, so we
> have to use tools in that distro.
> 

I'm using DRBD. I was using LVM2 on a multiple-primary DRBD (eg one big
DRBD volume cut into slices with LVM) and when it worked it was fine but
it would split brain occasionally (on startup after a crash normally,
not just spontaneously) and the CLVM daemon would hang on occasion for
no good reason.

Now I'm using DRBD on LVM on RAID0 and only multiple-primary where
necessary. Each DRBD is formed from an LV on each node. Extra work to
create a new DRBD volume (create LV on both nodes then set up the DRBD)
but much less likely to go wrong during normal use - it hasn't gone
wrong yet after months of use!

A better setup though would be a SAN consisting of iSCSI on DRBD in
single primary mode (using HA to handle failover if the primary fails)
and all the hosts using iSCSI. I don't have enough hardware to make that
work though unfortunately.

James


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