[ILUG] NBD's, lihux-HA, GFS/GNBD vs. DRBD/heartbeat

[David Golden]

On Monday 28 February 2005 15:19, John P. Looney wrote:

>  I did some more playing, but gave up on it as a "nice idea, needs a
> lot of work".
>

Well, Sistina were supposed to have done a lot of work, hence,
among other things, GFS, GNBD (souped up NBD), DLM, dm_multipath, and 
other quite interesting stuff  that RH quietly open sourced [1] a while 
back, probably confusing or at least surprising  OpenGFS preople in the 
process, I guess...

I intend* to test at some stage GFS and GNBD and sundry supporting
code to farm out our SAN to our new cluster nodes  (versus Lustre,
probably, my thinking is that GFS is most appropriate
for /home,  and Lustre or PVFS for shared /scratch)

Initially, we will probably run GFS on SAN-connected head nodes, farmed
out to the rest of the system with NFS. But  NFS has some problems (a) 
it sucks (for the application domain), (b) it kinda sucks (generally) 
and (c) users never really seem to take stuff like  "that won't work, 
damnit, this NFS is only close-to-open consistent!" to heart.

(*if the software patent situation doesn't make me leave the 
computer industry in disgust, of course, and right after the 
umpty-zillion other things I have to do to our new cluster)

[1] http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/