On Apr 23, 2010, at 1:00 PM, James jchase@mandaladesigns.com wrote:
http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/doc/nfscookbook.pdf
I think it'd be much easier if you just replicate the data between the servers with rsync or something. GFS sounds like way overkill for a couple of web servers.
Maybe you're right that GFS would be overkill -- I know you have to setup the whole clustering environment before it will work. Even though NFS would be easy to setup, it seems like it would just add more servers into the mix. We really want to achieve automatic failover at all levels and setting up NFS to replicate in real time and run the extra servers for that seems like it would require more resources. I'd rather put the time into understanding the complexities of the clustering environment setup and management and save some server sprawl
I'll look into OCFS2 and gluster to see if those are good options. Thanks for those suggestions.
Web servers are mostly read-only, so unless your web servers are going to do a lot of writing to shared storage I would simply use rsync to a local disk in each server, or use NFS, even NFS and heartbeat for redundancy will be 100 times simpler to setup and maintain.
GFS/OCFS2/Gluster/Lustre are really for multi-writers to shared storage such as a large NFS server cluster (4-8-16 nodes) serving thousands of clients for general file services, not thousands of clients accessing shared storage directly.
-Ross