[Linux-cluster] No storage cluster configuration

[Michael Will]

How many other technologies are being kept out of redhat
because of 'deep seated hatred of elite engineers'?

I am forced to sell (non-gfs based) fileservers with SLES9 simply
because
there is no XFS support in RHEL4. Or I have to go the centos route which
has the centos-plus packages that reintroduce XFS, but then I can't sell
redhat's support contracts.

Same for desktops with proper KDE integration.

Now DRDB I did not know about but am certainly curious about - the last
time I
investigated that approach was with nbd / dnbd and did not result in a
lot 
of confidence or the feeling that it was actively maintained.

Michael Will
PS: Love RHEL4 because of CS and GFS

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-cluster-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:linux-cluster-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Lon Hohberger
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 12:12 PM
To: linux clustering
Subject: Re: [Linux-cluster] No storage cluster configuration

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 15:37 -0400, Lon Hohberger wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 07:42 -0300, Celso K. Webber wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > Does anyone from Red Hat would tell me if Red Hat supports a no 
> > external storage environment when using RH Cluster Suite
> 
> Yes...
> 
> > and DRDB for replicating
> > data beetween cluster nodes?
> 
> No.
> 
> > When customers come to us arguing that IBM is offering SuSE Cluster 
> > solutions without the need of an external storage, we usually tell 
> > them to go on if they don't value their data. IBM on its turn tells 
> > that DRDB is stable enough for production, even when using Oracle 
> > database on top of it.
> 
> There is, or was, some deep-seated hatred between some of our elite 
> engineers and DRBD, but I don't remember what it was.  It's not part 
> of the kernel.
> 
> > We have lost some projects because of this "magical solution" of 
> > using DRDB instead of an external storage, but we are still against 
> > deploying production cluster solutions using DRDB or similar
solutions.
> 
> We don't ship DRBD.  If that changes, we can certainly support it.  In

> fact, people from the community have asked about it, too.  Eventually,

> we may have to add support for it to our upstream linux-cluster 
> project, even if Red Hat never ships it - mostly due to its simplicity

> to configure, and ease of use in failover environments.

Sidenote - if anyone wants to try the DRBD device script (resource
agent) from the Linux-HA pool on linux-cluster, it "should" work with
little or no modifications.  Linux-HA and linux-cluster use a similar
script for resources.

Note, however, that the stable version of DRBD is not suitable for use
with GFS (GFS requires multiple concurrent writers).  Recently, someone
pointed out that the development version of DRBD allows concurrent
writes from both nodes, which would then make it suitable for use with
GFS.

Whether or not Red Hat picks it up is another question, which I can't
really answer :)

-- Lon

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