Coert Waagmeester wrote:
>
> At our office a have a server running 3 Xen domains. Mail server, etc.
>
> I want to make this setup more redundant.
>
> There are a few howtos on the combination of Xen, DRBD, and heartbeat.
> That is probably the best way.
>
> Another option I am looking at is a piece of shared storage,
> a machine running CentOS with a large software RAID 5 array.
>
> What is the best means of sharing the storage?
> I would really like to use a combination of an iSCSI target server, and
> GFS or OCFS.
>
> But the iSCSI target server in the CentOS repos is a 'technology
> preview'
>
> Have any of you used the iSCSI target server in a production environment
> yet?
>
> Is NFS and option?
I've always liked the 'low-tech' way of using RAID1 in a box with
swappable disks and keeping a spare chassis handy. In the most common
scenario of a single drive failure you will keep running at full speed
and can replace the drive at your convenience. For a less likely
motherboard or power supply failure, you move the disks to the other
chassis and are up in the time it takes to reboot. And if the whole
thing melts, you can recover the data off of any single disk you have
left. You still need backups, of course and you need an on-site person
to swap drives. You could automate it a bit more with drbl and a
heartbeat failover to keep the standby live, but that adds a lot of
complexity and more things to go wrong.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com