[CentOS] iSCSI / GFS shared web server file system

Sat Apr 24 20:31:40 UTC 2010
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Apr 23, 2010, at 1:00 PM, James <jchase at mandaladesigns.com> wrote:

>
>> http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/doc/nfscookbook.pdf
>>
>> I think it'd be much easier if you just replicate the data between
>> the servers with rsync or something. GFS sounds like way overkill
>> for a couple of web servers.
>>
> Maybe you're right that GFS would be overkill -- I know you have to
> setup the whole clustering environment before it will work. Even  
> though
> NFS would be easy to setup, it seems like it would just add more  
> servers
> into the mix. We really want to achieve automatic failover at all  
> levels
> and setting up NFS to replicate in real time and run the extra servers
> for that seems like it would require more resources. I'd rather put  
> the
> time into understanding the complexities of the clustering environment
> setup and management and save some server sprawl
>
> I'll look into OCFS2 and gluster to see if those are good options.
> Thanks for those suggestions.

Web servers are mostly read-only, so unless your web servers are going  
to do a lot of writing to shared storage I would simply use rsync to a  
local disk in each server, or use NFS, even NFS and heartbeat for  
redundancy will be 100 times simpler to setup and maintain.

GFS/OCFS2/Gluster/Lustre are really for multi-writers to shared  
storage such as a large NFS server cluster (4-8-16 nodes) serving  
thousands of clients for general file services, not thousands of  
clients accessing shared storage directly.

-Ross