[CentOS-virt] KVM virtual machine and SAN storage with FC

Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel at gmail.com
Sat Jul 6 03:32:20 UTC 2013


On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Gene <gh5046 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 10:25 PM, denis bahati <djbahati at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hi Team,
>>
>> Thanks for the good explanation.
>>
>> If that is not workable for the database, can anyone recommend me for the
>> setup of the database clients and data files in order to achieve HA and load
>> balancing? How should I set up my VMs and stations (Two machines with two
>> VMs each)? I will appreciate for a workable approach and that is practical
>> for the HA/Load balancing.
>
> It depends on what database product you're using.  If it's Oracle
> Database Server it's designed to work with shared devices/file
> systems.  You shouldn't have a problem running it in an active/active
> (load balanced) configuration.  If it's MySQL/MariaDB the best you can
> hope for, as far as I know, is an active/passive configuration with
> replication.

Oracle is hideously expensive in this mode. It basically uses a
customized operating system, and it's *still* prone to the basic
problem of locking transactions to avoid conflicts. They just expend a
*lot* of system and software resources to manage it, which is why such
a clustered Oracle database takes so much resources.

There is "Multiple-Master MySQL", which basically provides built-in
election of the master node and interesting load factors to split the
load, and uses a separate IP address for the "master" node. It works
pretty well and is available in the "mysql-mmm" package from EPEL.

> I'm guessing you're using MySQL.  Make your database highly available
> in an active/passive configuration with replication and use some sort
> of failover (heartbeat, carp, etc) or a network load balancer.
> Depending on your application you can still run it in a active/active
> (load balanced) configuration.

Been there, done that, had *way* too many places just wave their hands
at the failover and never actually configure it. mysql-mmm takes a lot
of the guesswork out.

>>
>> Regards
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>
>>
>> To: denis bahati <djbahati at yahoo.co.uk>; Discussion about the virtualization
>> on CentOS <centos-virt at centos.org>
>> Cc: "brett at worth.id.au" <brett at worth.id.au>
>> Sent: Thursday, 4 July 2013, 18:32
>>
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS-virt] KVM virtual machine and SAN storage with FC
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 12:44 AM, denis bahati <djbahati at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Hi Brett,
>>>
>>> On my plan is as follows:
>>>
>>> I have two machine (Server) that will host two VM each. One for database
>>> and
>>> one for application. Then the two machine will provide (Load Balance and
>>> High availability). My intention is that all application files and data
>>> file
>>> for the database should reside on the SAN storage for easy access and
>>> update.
>>
>> Don't... do this. Two database clients writing to the same database
>> filesystem back ends, simultaneously, is an enormous source of excited
>> sounding flow charts and proposals which simply do not work and are
>> very, very likely to corrupt your database beyond recover. These
>> problems have been examined, for *decades* with shared home
>> directories and saved email and for high performance or clustered
>> databases that need to not have "split brain" skew, It Does Not Work.
>>
>> Set up a proper database *cluster* with distinct back ends.
>>
>>> Therefore the storage should be accessible to both VMs through mounting
>>> the
>>> SAN storage to the VMs. The connection between SAN storage and the servers
>>> is through Fiber Channel.
>>
>> Survey says *bzzzt*. See above for databases. For shared storage, you
>> should really be using some sort of network based access to a
>> filesystem back end. NetApp and EMC spend *billions* in research
>> building high availability shared storage, and even they don't pull
>> stunts like this the last I looked. I can vaguely imagine one of the
>> hosts doing write access and the other having read-only access. But
>> really, most databases today support good clustering configurations
>> that avoid precisely these issues.
>>
>>> I have seen somewhere talking about DM-Multipath but i dont know if this
>>> can
>>> help or the use of VT-d if can help. I will also appreciate if you provide
>>> some links to give me insight of how to do this.
>>
>> Multipath does not mean "multiple clients of the same hardware
>> storage". That's effectively like letting two kernels write to the
>> same actual disk at the same time, and it's quite dangerous.
>>
>> Now, if you want each client to access their own fiber channel disk
>> resource, that should be workable. Even if you have to mount the fiber
>> channel resources on the KVM host, and make disk images for the KVM
>> guest, that should at least get you a testable resource. But the
>> normal approach is have a fiber channel storage server that makes disk
>> images available via NFS, so that the guest VM's can be migrated from
>> one server to another with the shared storage more safely.
>>
>>
>>
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