From owner-freebsd-cluster Fri Oct 5 12:24:28 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-cluster@freebsd.org Received: from elm.phenome.org (elm.phenome.org [194.153.169.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9DC8237B406 for ; Fri, 5 Oct 2001 12:24:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (joshua@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost (8.12.0.Beta19/8.12.0.Beta19/Debian 8.12.0.Beta19) with ESMTP id f95JON8A011665; Fri, 5 Oct 2001 20:24:23 +0100 Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 20:24:23 +0100 (BST) From: Joshua Goodall X-X-Sender: To: =?iso-8859-1?q?Fabrizio=20Ravazzini?= Cc: Subject: Re: NFS Alternatives? In-Reply-To: <20011005184111.93369.qmail@web20105.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-cluster@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, [iso-8859-1] Fabrizio Ravazzini wrote: > Hello all I would like to build a mail/web cluster > server like this: > > Machine---+ > A | +-----+ > +-|Disks| > Machine-----| | > B +-----+ > > I want the two machines accessing the disk array > (for example the Compaq smart array disk set) at the > same time and load balanced. > I'd like the disks attached at the two machines via > scsi or Ethernet. Parallel writeable mounts are not in any release version of FreeBSD. > To manage the Load Balancing I think to use > Balance.sourceforge.net or Dns RoundRobin. You need something slightly more intelligent than roundrobin DNS, unless you want half your users to lose access if a machine goes down. IIRC, Balance requires another machine in front of A & B. > But to share the disks... > ...I've thinked about NFS but we need a third machine > to manage the NFS server for the array. > Then I've found Gfs (Global File System) but seems > only for LinuX. I recently rejected GFS for a production recommendation on the grounds of a) lack of production maturity b) STOMITH c) DMEP d) Linux-only. Your criteria may vary. Other parallel filesystems exist (e.g. CXFS, AdvFS) but not in FreeBSD and only at the research/experimental level for Linux, AFAIK (e.g. PVFS, which isn't a high-availability architecture anyway). > The problem is that I don't want the single point of > failure which is the NFS server. You'll need to look at commercial products (HA-NFS implementations, Netapps etc), not OSS, for this, unless you can get away with application-level replication. I'd love to be told I'm wrong on the above. Anyone know of a OSS (BSD or GPL) *production-grade* HA-NFS or parallel-mount fs (other than GFS)? Joshua To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message