[CentOS] CentOS MD RAID 1 on Openfiler iSCSI

[John R Pierce]

On 06/28/10 12:13 PM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:
> Has anybody tried or knows if it is possible to create a MD RAID1
> device using networked iSCSI devices like those created using
> OpenFiler?
>
> The idea I'm thinking of here is to use two OpenFiler servers with
> physical drives in RAID 1, to create iSCSI virtual devices and run
> CentOS guest VMs off the MD RAID 1 device. Since theoretically, this
> setup would survive both a single physical drive failure as well as a
> machine failure on the storage side with a much shorter failover time
> than say using heartbeat.
>    

I considered much the same a couple years ago, its certainly doable.... 
But, after playing with it a bit in the lab, I moved onto something more 
robust...

the downside is A) iscsi on homebrew systems like openfiler tends to be 
less than rock solid reliable.  and B) upon a 'failure', the rebuild 
times will require remirroring the whole volume, which is going to take 
quite awhile across two iscsi targets.