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Re: LVS-DR Filesystem

To: "LinuxVirtualServer.org users mailing list." <lvs-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: LVS-DR Filesystem
From: Graeme Fowler <graeme@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:20:21 +0000
Hi

On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 02:57 -0500, Webmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> What is the best way to handle a filesystem using an LVS-DR cluster?  

Do you really mean "what's the best way to have a shared filesystem used
by my realservers"?

> I have heard of using a NAS box, but from what I understand it is only
> recommended to use a max of 8 nodes with that.

Well, that depends on what service you're providing and what sort of
budget you have. I'm using a NetApp FAS270c in one production platform
to provide both NFS and CIFS (SMB) exports/shares to <counts...> about
26 mixed Windows and Linux realservers (web and mail), and it isn't
breaking a sweat. It will scale much further than it already has.

> I have also heard of GFS, DFS, AFS, etc.  I want to make the cluster highly
> scalable and would like to not have a ceiling on the max number of nodes.
> If I use something like say GFS, will I have any data corruption problems?  

I haven't much experience of these sorts of filesystems, but IIRC the
last time I read RedHat's whitepapers about GFS it required some sort of
consolidated backend like a SAN which you then export LUNs from towards
your GFS cluster. It wasn't a road I wanted to travel down, so I went
with trusty NFS - its' foibles are well documented.

I'd say you should get yourself a powerful, resilient, multi-cpu and
multi-psu server with a good RAID array using fast SCSI disks (15k RPM)
and then use it as an NFS server. Of course, you haven't explained
entirely what it is you're doing, so this could be way off the mark :)

Graeme


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