[aklug] Recommendations for DRBD + (GFS | Lustre)

Looking for the wisdom of the crowd:
I've been running DRBD on (small) clusters of servers for a few years. (DRBD
is a distributed RAID block device, similar to md -- software raid, but with
hard drives spread out over multiple servers rather than just one.)
Until now I've been using the Primary/Secondary mode, where only one half of
the DRBD can write to disk at any one time.

I'd like to switch to a clustered filesystem, and I see that DRBD has
support for GFS. Does anyone in the group have experience with GFS?

Another filesystem alternative appears to be Lustre, which seems (at first
glance) to provide very high performance, but be much more complicated.

In general I don't need very high performance; I'm running a few web sites,
file servers, and VMware machines, supporting users connected via DSL. I'm
more interested in the high availability of DRBD (and that works very well),
potentially coupled with the higher overall performance of a clustered
filesystem.

My goal is a 3-server cluster, with 3 arrays (one per 'pair' of servers.)
Should I try DRBD+GFS, DRBD+Lustre, or stick with plain DRBD & ext3, as I've
been doing?

Thanks as always,
Jeremy Austin
IT Administrator
Whitestone, Alaska

---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Wed Jan 14 08:24:21 2009