We have two virtual machines on ESX 3 running CentOS 4.3 and we'd like to turn them into some sort of highly available nfs file server. Currently, I am familiar with DRBD and RHCS but I was curious what others might recommend in such a situation.
I'm not sure how easily we could use RHCS in such a situation because we don't really have the advantage of shared storage in this setup. We are strictly limited to the two boxes. Having said that, it would be nice to have some of the exports running on one node (tied to a VIP) and others on the other node (tied to another VIP) if possible and manage those services individually if needed. So basically both nodes would be exporting select locations at any given time on this highly available file system. That is not 100% necessary but it would be nice if the capability is there. I would assume some sort of fencing mechanism would need to been in place as well.
This might not be the best place to ask an ESX question but would 'raw device mapping' work in such a scenario? I don't know much about it.
I can give more details if needed but hopefully this is enough for some suggestions. Thanks!
Any advice?
On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 17:36 -0400, Scott McClanahan wrote:
We have two virtual machines on ESX 3 running CentOS 4.3 and we'd like to turn them into some sort of highly available nfs file server. Currently, I am familiar with DRBD and RHCS but I was curious what others might recommend in such a situation.
I'm not sure how easily we could use RHCS in such a situation because we don't really have the advantage of shared storage in this setup. We are strictly limited to the two boxes. Having said that, it would be nice to have some of the exports running on one node (tied to a VIP) and others on the other node (tied to another VIP) if possible and manage those services individually if needed. So basically both nodes would be exporting select locations at any given time on this highly available file system. That is not 100% necessary but it would be nice if the capability is there. I would assume some sort of fencing mechanism would need to been in place as well.
This might not be the best place to ask an ESX question but would 'raw device mapping' work in such a scenario? I don't know much about it.
I can give more details if needed but hopefully this is enough for some suggestions. Thanks!
On 5/22/07, Scott McClanahan scott.mcclanahan@trnswrks.com wrote:
We have two virtual machines on ESX 3 running CentOS 4.3 and we'd like to turn them into some sort of highly available nfs file server. Currently, I am familiar with DRBD and RHCS but I was curious what others might recommend in such a situation.
I'm not sure how easily we could use RHCS in such a situation because we don't really have the advantage of shared storage in this setup. We are strictly limited to the two boxes. Having said that, it would be nice to have some of the exports running on one node (tied to a VIP) and others on the other node (tied to another VIP) if possible and manage those services individually if needed. So basically both nodes would be exporting select locations at any given time on this highly available file system. That is not 100% necessary but it would be nice if the capability is there. I would assume some sort of fencing mechanism would need to been in place as well.
1) If you have a high network load.. not sure if ESX is the way to go 2) I have a limited knowledge, but NFS is not a protocol that deals with 'failover' very well. You will want to look at a cluster filesystem like GFS.
This might not be the best place to ask an ESX question but would 'raw device mapping' work in such a scenario? I don't know much about it.
I can give more details if needed but hopefully this is enough for some suggestions. Thanks!
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