Re: [PATCH 00/16] DRBD: a block device for HA clusters

From: david
Date: Sun May 03 2009 - 10:38:57 EST


On Sun, 3 May 2009, James Bottomley wrote:

Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/16] DRBD: a block device for HA clusters

On Sat, 2009-05-02 at 22:40 -0700, david@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Sun, 3 May 2009, Willy Tarreau wrote:

On Sat, May 02, 2009 at 09:33:35AM +0200, Bart Van Assche wrote:
On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Andrew Morton
<akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:26:36 +0200 Philipp Reisner <philipp.reisner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This is a repost of DRBD

Is it being used anywhere for anything? If so, where and what?

One popular application is to run iSCSI and HA software on top of DRBD
in order to build a highly available iSCSI storage target.

Confirmed, I have several customers who're doing exactly that.

I will also say that there are a lot of us out here who would have a use
for DRDB in our HA setups, but have held off implementing it specificly
because it's not yet in the upstream kernel.

Actually, that's not a particularly strong reason because we already
have an in-kernel replicator that has much of the functionality of drbd
that you could use. The main reason for wanting drbd in kernel is that
it has a *current* user base.

Both the in kernel md/nbd and drbd do sync and async replication with
primary side bitmaps. The main differences are:

* md/nbd can do 1 to N replication,
* drbd can do active/active replication (useful for cluster
filesystems)
* The chunk size of the md/nbd is tunable
* With the updated nbd-tools, current md/nbd can do point in time
rollback on transaction logged secondaries (a BCS requirement)
* drbd manages the mirror state explicitly, md/nbd needs a user
space helper

And probably a few others I forget.

one very big one:

DRDB has better support for dealing with split brain situations and recovering from them.

David Lang
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