This is a quick howto build a simple GNBD server with one GFS Partition exported to two nodes, this two nodes will use the GFS Partition as document root for apache, i will use three XEN machines for setting up and they running CentOS 5.2.

I created this setup on RHEL 5.2 servers, no differences between CentOS and RHEL, but RHEL need a registration on Advance Software to get some clustering packages which i don’t have, so i did rpmbuild fo

Posted in GNBD, linux-cluster 4 Comments »

My goal by using DRBD as Primary/Primary with GFS is to load balance a http service, my servers looks like the following:
[IMAGE]
Load Balancer – GFS – Primary-Primary

i use the GFS partition as document-root for my webserver (Apache).
maybe it’s better to use SAN as storage but it’s so expensive, another solutions maybe iSCSI or GNBD but also it’s need more servers which needs extra money 🙂
maybe in the future i will implement it using SAN, iSCSI or GNBD but for now it’s good with DRBD and GFS as two nodes with load balancer and it’s fast enough.

for testing and preparing this quick howto i used Xen to create 2 virtual machine and centos 5 as OS. the partition that i want to use as GFS is named xvdb1, make sure that your partition don’t contain any data you want (it will be destroyed)
to destroy the partition i used

Posted in DRBD, linux-cluster 23 Comments »