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