Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 14:24:49 +0100 (MET) From: Michael Grant <mg-fbsd3@grant.org> To: freebsd-cluster@freebsd.org Subject: Re: clustering freebsd Message-ID: <200211101324.gAADOng29727@splat.grant.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Thanks, all of you, for your excellent replies. After reading several replies, yes, it's load balancing that I want to do. That looks very promising to solve the front-end machine problem. I have started looking around for load balancer devices, there seem to be a quite a few on the market, they seem to be in the US$10K range. Some of them like Cisco's LocalDirector product seem to work in conjunction with a router. It's possible that my ISP has one of these or something similar. A quite cool one is here, only 1U high and fully redundant: http://www.loadbalancer.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=9 I'll look more into freevrrpd and loadd. On the shared disk side, I've not found the perfect solution (yet). This does seem to be a sticky problem. Several of you have said I don't want to do this. Well, I think I do and worst case, I'll end up using a separate HA configured box and nfs mount it like Compaq's prolient cluster thingy. I haven't give up looking for a better solution though. The need for having a shared writable file system mainly comes from having shell users with home directories and mail boxes. I have had great resistance from the users trying to move mailboxes into another format other than plain mbox format. i.e. moving mail into mysql would not be a popular idea. If mysql can replicate things like that, I wonder about implementing a file system ontop of mysql? The performance would probably suck though. I'm surprised that there isn't some extension to JFS (the Journaling File System) to do something like I want. Alexander mentions AFS. In fact, the folks who brought you AFS have something called CODA which seems to be a network replicated file system. I read up on using it and it's quite complicated and seems to have some restrictions on the size of file systems. It also seems like it's still in an experimental state. It did't give me a warm fuzzy feeling, but it certainly is cool. Anyone else have experience using it? I couldn't find much on iSCSI for freebsd and it's not clear to me that you could have n systems writing to a raid array with vinum. I can believe easily that you could have one system write to a vinum raid array spread over several systems via iscsi though. If anyone has any ideas on this front, I'd like to hear them. Michael Grant To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200211101324.gAADOng29727>