[CentOS] Clustering solutions - mail, www, storage.

Tait Clarridge tait at taiter.com
Tue Jan 10 21:01:54 UTC 2012


> I am currently working for a hosting provider in a 100+ linux hosts'
> environment. We have www, mail HA solutions, as storage we mainly use
> NFS at the moment. We are also using DRBD, Heartbeat, Corosync.
> 
> I am now gathering info to make a cluster with:
> - two virtualization nodes (active master and passive slave);
> - two storage nodes (for vm files) used by mentioned virtualization
> nodes (also active/passive).
> 
> For virtualization I am thinking to use OpenVZ or KVM. For storage NFS
> or iSCSI. Could you please share your experiences with these
> technologies? Which one would you use and why? Are there any good
> alternatives in CentOS?
> 
> Thanks for the info,
> Rafal.

I mainly go with Xen for a virtualization platform but KVM will work as
well assuming that your hardware supports it.

For a storage platform I'm assuming you are going to use servers with
disk exporting as either NFS or iSCSI. If you are going this route I
would suggest spending the money on a redundant storage array (one with
redundant heads, power supplies, etc) that serves NFS as that I have
found the easiest to deal with for migrations and everything else.

If you can't do that, I would use servers with enough disk storage to
make a decent array, setup DRBD in master/slave and export via NFS to
your virtualization hosts.

If money is really tight you could setup just two servers that act as
virtualization hosts and storage platforms with an active/active
two-node cluster using master/master DRBD + GFS. Be warned that you will
lose quite a bit of performance due to the overhead of the cluster VS a
dedicated purpose-built storage array... but we've been running this for
a while without issue in some areas.

-Tait




More information about the CentOS mailing list