[Linux-cluster] Home-brew SAN/iSCSI

[Mike Cardwell]

Madison Kelly wrote:

>   Until now, I've been building 2-node clusters using DRBD+LVM for the 
> shared storage. I've been teaching myself clustering, so I don't have a 
> world of capital to sink into hardware at the moment. I would like to 
> start getting some experience with 3+ nodes using a central SAN disk.
> 
>   So I've been pricing out the minimal hardware for a four-node cluster 
> and have something to start with. My current hiccup though is the SAN 
> side. I've searched around, but have not been able to get a clear answer.
> 
>   Is it possible to build a host machine (CentOS/Debian) to have a 
> simple MD device and make it available to the cluster nodes as an 
> iSCSI/SAN device? Being a learning exercise, I am not too worried about 
> speed or redundancy (beyond testing failure types and recovery).

Yeah, that's possible. Just use iscsid to export the device. If this is 
just for testing/learning purposes have you considered using virtual 
machines to minimise the hardware footprint? You could have a single 
host machine that acts as the SAN, exporting a device using iscsid and 
three vm's running on top of VMWare server on the same machine which 
make up the cluster...

-- 
Mike Cardwell - IT Consultant and LAMP developer
Cardwell IT Ltd. (UK Reg'd Company #06920226) http://cardwellit.com/
Technical Blog: https://secure.grepular.com/blog/