Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:20:32 +0100 From: Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com> To: koitsu@FreeBSD.org, sven@dmv.com Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Multi-machine mirroring choices Message-ID: <E1KImKO-000Gqk-ST@dilbert.ticketswitch.com> In-Reply-To: <20080715145426.GA31340@eos.sc1.parodius.com>
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> However, I must ask you this: why are you doing things the way you are? > Why are you using the equivalent of RAID 1 but for entire computers? Is > there some reason you aren't using a filer (e.g. NetApp) for your data, > thus keeping it centralised? I am not the roiginal poster, but I am doing something very similar and can answer that question for you. Some people get paranoid about the whole "single point of failure" thing. I originally suggestted that we buy a filer and have identical servers so if one breaks we connect the other to the filer, but the response I got was "what if the filer breaks?". So in the end I had to show we have duplicate independent machines, with the data kept symetrical on them at all times. It does actually work quite nicely actually - I have an "'active" database machine, and a "passive". The opassive is only used if the active fails, and the drives are run as a gmirror pair with the remote one being mounted using ggated. It also means I can flip from active to passive when I want to do an OS upgrade on the active machine. Switching takes a few seconds, and this is fine for our setup. So the answer is that the descisiuon was taken out of my hands - but this is not uncommon, and as a roll-your-own cluster it works very nicely. -pete.
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