From: Ross S. W. W. <RW...@me...> - 2012-03-28 16:43:40
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Kushnir, Michael wrote: > > Good afternoon, > > I’m an avid DRBD user. Recently, there was a lot of talk on > the DRBD mailing list about DRBD Dual-Primary with iSCSI and > multipath. The problems with such a setup are summarized > here: > http://fghaas.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/dual-primary-drbd-iscsi-and-multipath-dont-do-that/ > > I was wondering If it is possible to add such a feature to > IET? Has anyone ever considered such functionality? How much > would such an effort cost if someone were willing to sponsor > the feature? In order to have a cluster-aware iSCSI target there would need to be significant changes in both the configuration side and operating side. One change that pops in my head is the coordination of SCSI reservations between the targets participating. Reservations could not be granted or revoked until all members approved the reservation. This means that all IO operations that depend on frequest RESERVE/RELEASE operations, such as clustered file systems would hit a triple latency penalty, or worse for geographically disperse clusters. One would also need to coordinate configuration of course! Then there is handling storage failures and you can see how things start to get way out of control. The best use of IET and DRBD is in a fail-over scenario. Have two servers serving up 50% of the storage needs each off of top-shelf disks, the other 50% of storage off of slower but still enterprise quality disks, say SAS and SATA. Have DRBD replicate the SAS on one server to the SATA on the other server and use something such as heartbeat to fail-over the targets and IP addresses from one server to the other in the event of failure. Each server has multiple interfaces for doing MPIO to the target, you just don't do MPIO to an active-active DRBD device across two servers. For geographically disperse clusters, follow the same principal as above, but the primary storage is for in-site hosts and the secondary is fail-over for the other site. Tricky part here is how to fail-over the IPs to the other site... -Ross ______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof. |