[Gluster-devel] HA failover question.

[Chris Johnson]

      Hey all.

      I'm getting an idea on what AFR does here.  Thank you for the
documentration pointers.  We have a specific implementation in mind of
course.  I still haven't figured out it if glusterfs can do this yet.

      My definition of High Availability for a file system includes
multiple points of access.  If an access node drops out I don't want my
clients to even blink.  Here's what I want to do.

      We have this monstrosity called a SATABeast.  Really big drive loaded
RAID system with two DELLS frontending it, redundant paths yada yada.
To the DELL nodes it just looks like a LOT of really big drives, /dev/sda
to /dev/sdz in CentOS5.  It's important to note that the Beast looks
identical to the DELL frontends.  It is identical, it's the same
Beats.

      What I'd like to do of course is to use the frontends in a
failover capacity.  If one frontend fails for whatever reason I want
the other to seamlessly take over the whole job so the clients don't
even notice the loss.  And of course when the node comes back the load
redistributes.  Doing AFR in this configuration would be great to.
We've tried other forms of RAID and there are limitations as we all
know.  Really like to find a way around them.

      Can GlusterFS do this?  If so can someone provide me with client
and server config files for this please?  Much appreciated.

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