Tim Freeman, Software Developer and Research Assistant at Globus Toolkit, published a wonderful post explaining how to achieve high-availability for Xen hosts, thanks to open source tools DRDB, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Global Network Block Device (GNBD). And without a shared storage facility like a SAN.
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I have two cheap computers and so I put some big disks in them and mirrored the disks over the network. Instead of using one file server node and RAID1, this is something like a “whole system RAID”. If anything at all breaks in either computer, hosted services can keep running and data is unharmed except for whatever was unsynced in RAM.
To accomplish the disk mirror I used DRBD. DRBD is a special block device that is designed for highly available clusters, it mirrors activity directly at the block device level across the network to another disk. So like a RAID1 configuration over the network.
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That is how the disk is setup, now how to access it remotely? You could run a shared filesystem of course, exporting via an NFS server on host A (or B). Instead, having heard good things about Global Network Block Device (GNBD) on the Xen mailing lists, I chose to export the logical block devices (from LVM) directly over the network with GNBD. Another node makes a GNBD import and the block device appears to be a local block device there, ready to mount into the file hierarchy. This is like iSCSI but it is a snap to set up and use.
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…using GNBD, you can live-migrate the VM to any node that can do a GNBD import. This is nice to have. I only live migrate manually, though. Both DRBD and GNBD have some features that allow for seamless failover but I don’t really need any of this at home…
Read the whole post at source.
How much time before someone adopt this solution with VMware Server for Linux too?