[CentOS] High-Availability Clustering and drbd?

Johnny Hughes mailing-lists at hughesjr.com
Fri Mar 17 08:30:52 UTC 2006


On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 23:52 -0800, Benjamin Smith wrote:
> Ugh. What a week! 
> 
> Anyway, my situation is that we have a production server in San Fransisco, and 
> a "hot" backup in my hometown (Chico, CA) . 
>
> What I'd like to do is mirror the production server to the local one, so that 
> if the SF server goes down, we have work saved to the last possible moment. 
> Say, within 10 minutes.... Is this feasible? 

I don't think something like DRBD is going to work very well across a
WAN link.  The amount of traffic generated by drbd can be pretty large,
it is enough that I normally use a gigabit crossover cable between 2
servers (if possible) when using drbd on them.

I would think that rsyncs of the appropriate directories at a period in
time might be the best way to handle this.

I am getting ready to do this in then next week or so myself ... if I
have any luck, I'll tell you what solution I found.  In my case I am
also worried about a mysql database that has live info in it ... and an
ldap database too.


> On Friday 10 March 2006 03:43, Will McDonald wrote:
> > On 10/03/06, Benjamin Smith <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:
> > > Does anyone here on this list have experience with HA clustering?
> > >
> > > I'm previewing drbd as a potential tool, and wanted to know if anyone here 
> has
> > > experiemented with it at all... How stable is it? Does the additional
> > > likelyhood of failure given the additional complexity actually get
> > > compensated by a better overall system?
> > >
> > > http://www.drbd.org/
> > 
> > I've used DRBD and Heartbeat in various guises for various roles over
> > the last 5 or 6 years. Initially I was loathe to put it in production,
> > it just didn't seem polished enough.
> > 
> > Nowadays it's pretty decent though we don't use it for vast quantities of 
> data.
> > 
> > We have some old-ish boxes running as LVS loadbalancers for a handful
> > of mail and webservers and these are pretty solid.
> > 
> > We run DRBD/Heartbeat clusters for a Qmail/VPOPMail NFS mailstore
> > which holds around 40GB of customer Maildirs. That's running the
> > packaged DRBD and Heartbeat RPMs from CentOS Extras and has been solid
> > since we switched back to NFS3 from NFS4.
> > 
> > We run a similar setup with small MySQL and Postgres databases and
> > that's pretty reliable too.
> > 
> > Will.
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