[Gluster-devel] HA failover question.

[Chris Johnson]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Daniel van Ham Colchete wrote:

      Ok, clearly missing something here.  I had no idea you could do
this AFR just from the client side.  That's cool.  And that would
seem to allow for failover too, yes?  You still need two servers.
They self heal if one comes back here?  How does that work?  Does
there need to be server support for this?

      Well aware of the short comings.  When you live off grants and
shoes strings you do what you can.  Neat box, yes.  Weighs a ton.
Unless you strip it you need a fork lift to move it.

      Any other thoughts on how to get as much availabilty out of this
as possible with GlusterFS would be helpfull.

> Chris,
>
> so both servers are accessing the same SATABeast to export the same
> filesystem? If so, AFR is not what you are looking for. AFR will try to
> replicate the files to both servers and they already to this in the
> back-end. If you have two different iSCSI virtual disks to each server, them
> AFR is what you are looking for.
>
> Right now AFR will always read from the first available server. Not
> splitting the read traffic. This will change with GlusterFS 1.4 (with the HA
> translator, not sure though). But you can have two AFRs, each with one
> server as it's first subvolume. It would be like (doing AFR on the client
> side):
>
> === BEGIN CLIENT SPEC FILE ===
> volume s1-b1
>        type protocol/client
>        option transport-type tcp/client
>        option remote-host 172.16.0.1
>        option remote-subvolume b1
>        option transport-timeout 5
> end-volume
>
> volume s2-b1
>        type protocol/client
>        option transport-type tcp/client
>        option remote-host 172.16.0.2
>        option remote-subvolume b1
>        option transport-timeout 5
> end-volume
>
> volume s1-b2
>        type protocol/client
>        option transport-type tcp/client
>        option remote-host 172.16.0.1
>        option remote-subvolume b2
>        option transport-timeout 5
> end-volume
>
> volume s2-b2
>        type protocol/client
>        option transport-type tcp/client
>        option remote-host 172.16.0.2
>        option remote-subvolume b2
>        option transport-timeout 5
> end-volume
>
> volume s1-bn
>        type protocol/client
>        option transport-type tcp/client
>        option remote-host 172.16.0.1
>        option remote-subvolume bn
>        option transport-timeout 5
> end-volume
>
> volume afr1
>        type cluster/afr
>        subvolumes s1-b1 s2-b1
>        option replicate *:2
> end-volume
>
> volume afr2
>        type cluster/afr
>        subvolumes s2-b2 s1-b2
>        option replicate *:2
> end-volume
>
> volume unify
>        type cluster/unify
>        subvolumes afr1 afr2
>        option namespace s1-bn
>        option scheduler rr
>        option rr.limits.min-free-disk 5
> end-volume
> === END CLIENT SPEC FILE ===
>
> With this you have to replication you need, plus sharing the read traffic
> between the front-end storage servers. The write performance is always
> limited to the minimum write performance of each server.
>
> Please pay attention to the fact that you have a serious
> single-point-of-failure. A fire, electrical problems, human error and many
> other things can happen with that single SATABeast. I would have two. I
> always pair everything. But I really liked that SATABeast and having 42
> disks with only 4U.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-devel mailing list
> Gluster-devel at nongnu.org
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-devel
>
>
>

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