SCST, DRBD and Dual Primary Mode
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Contents |
Introduction
When building a high-availability solution with SCST and DRBD one has to choose an operation mode for DRBD. While single-primary mode is the easiest to set up, with dual primary mode it becomes possible to balance the load over the clustered servers. However, SCST and DRBD settings have to be chosen carefully in order to avoid data corruption with dual primary mode. One must make sure that SCST only confirms a write as finished to the multipath initiator after the data involved in write operation has been passed on to DRBD on both nodes.
SCST Configuration
In order to avoid data corruption it is crucial to use the following SCST settings for each DRBD block device exported via SCST:
- One can use either the vdisk_blockio device handler or vdisk_fileio.
- Caching MUST be disabled: set the nv_cache parameter to 0 in scst.conf.
- Write-through MUST be enabled: set the write_through parameter to 1 in scst.conf.
DRBD Configuration
As documented in the DRBD manual, dual primary mode only works with the DRBD replication protocol C and not with protocol A or B.
Initiator Configuration
When using VMware, do NOT use multipath I/O in round-robin mode. This mode namely depends on persistent reservations to guarantee data consistency. When running an SCST cluster, the SCST persistent reservation state is not shared between the two nodes.
References
- DRBD authors, [Dual Primary Mode], DRBD Manual, 2011.
- VMware, [iSCSI SAN Configuration Guide 4.1], VMware website, September 2010.
- Phil White, [VMware ESX, MPIO, SCST and DRBD in Dual Primary Mode], SCST Developers Mailing List, June 2010.
- Stefan Berger, [SCST and DRBD in Dual Primary Mode], DRBD users mailing list, June 2010.
- Bart Van Assche [SCST and DRBD in Dual Primary Mode], SCST Developers Mailing List, May 2011.
