[CentOS] centos 5 GFS/Cluster - configure fence using NIC?

[Karl R. Balsmeier]

John R Pierce wrote:
> Karl R. Balsmeier wrote:
>> How does one configure a fence device in the form of a NIC card in 
>> centos 5?  Is the gnbd item relevant to this?
>
> I'm not sure what 'a fence device in the form of a NIC card' is.   the 
> fence devices I'm familiar with include SCSI fence switches, 
> fiberchannel SAN switches, and APC SmartPlug power switches.
>
> in my test cluster, I used a Qlogic SANbox fiber switch to connect the 
> cluster nodes to the shared storage.    the fencing was done by 
> sending the Qlogic the commands to enable/disable the ports of the two 
> nodes so only the active node could access the shared storage.
>
> I suppose an Ethernet analog in an ISCSI SAN environment would be to 
> send commands to a layer-2 or layer-3 managed switch to manipulate the 
> VLANs to disable the standby nodes from accessing the ISCSI target 
> device.   These systems would need separate dedicated NICs for LAN 
> connectivity and cluster heartbeats.
>
>
OK, so it sounds like I have enough ethernet devices, and your notes 
help me to understand the purpose and nature of fencing a lot more.   I 
just need to isolate the potential on the iSCSI side of the equation as 
far as sending those signals to  the managed switch.

Right now I run on extreme summit switches which should suffice, and 
broadcomm GBNICs.

The iSCSI device we are using is a PromiseRAID M300i or M500i. 

It sounds on the surface like we might need a more solid fencing 
device...  Anyone agree or disagree?

-karl

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