[Gluster-users] New user questions - behavior of HA setup with network failure

[Robert Gormley]

Hi all,

Forgive the new-ish-ness of this question - I am reading through the docs, just trying to digest as much as possible as quickly as possible.

We're looking at a project - two sites, two servers, with the intent that they be "highly available" - not 'completely transparent to user', but 'back within 15 minutes or less'.

There -may- be load balancing, but that would be down the road, though see my question below.

My belief from reading is that setting up similar to the Tutorial Simple HA would be sufficient. What is the behavior in the event of a network outage. I would believe that both file systems start in sync, everything written to their ext3 filesystem. If Gluster detects the remote node is unavailable, how will it respond / re-sync? I read of 'split braining' which is probably sufficient for our needs (management is prepared to accept that if someone is working on a case in our application at the time of "disaster" or other outage, there may be some data / transaction loss).

But does anything else occur? Or can anything else be done, in the sense of: Detection of outage, locking of files (although this could be done by another mechanism), until an admin manually designates (or changes) the "favorite child" option so we can have some semblance of 'control', i.e. a replicating high availability set, but with a designated 'master'.

Forgive the at times vague language, feel free to ask for clarification, and my apologies if I'm misusing any Gluster terms, etc.

Re load balancing - how does Gluster handle concurrent writes to a file from two different servers? Is, for example, the appropriate lock only returned from the filesystem call when it has been communicated to the other node?

Thank you so much,

Robert Gormley
Senior Web Developer
Managed Care Systems, Inc. | 32531 N. Scottsdale Rd Suite 105, Scottsdale AZ 85266
Phone: 623.434.3881 x109 | Email: rgormley at mgcare.com
Web: www.mgcare.com | www.impactservicecenter.com