On 11/13/2014 04:53 PM, Ethan Wilson wrote:

On 13/11/2014 21:56, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

quoted

With DRBD and GFS2 it is true active/active at the block level.  You
just lose half your disk capacity due to the host-to-host mirroring.

Sorry but I don't share your definition of active/active.

Would you say that a raid1 is an active/active thing?

Doubling the number of disks and repeating the operation on both sides
is not active/active in the sense that people usually want.

Active/active commonly means that you have twice the performance of
active/passive.

In this sense DRBD not only is an active/passive but it is even way
below the performances of an active/passive because it has to transmit
the data to the peer in addition to write to the disks, and this takes
CPU time for memcpy and interrupts, introduces latency, requires
additional hardware (= fast networking dedicated to DRBD). An
active/passive with shared disks is hence "twice" (very roughly) faster
than DRBD at the same price spent on the head nodes. An active/active
with shared disks is hence 4 times (again very roughly) faster than
DRBD, at the same price for the head nodes.

In addition to this with DRBD you have to buy twice the number of disks,
which is also an additional expense. Marginally though, because a
shared-disk infrastructure is way more expensive than a direct-attached
one, but it has to be planned like that in advance, and not retrofitted
like you propose.

His current infrastructure cannot be easily converted to DRBD without
major losses: if he attempts to do so he will have almost double the
costs of a basic DRBD shared-nothing direct-attached infrastructure or
exactly double the cost of a shared-disk infrastructure, intended as
cost per TB of data. Unfortunately, after this he will still have half
the performances of an active/passive shared-disk clustered-MD solution.

He doesn't have an infrastructure yet.  He's attempting to build one but
purchased the wrong gear for his requirements.  I presented him with
options to do it the right way, and to salvage what he has already
purchased.  The DRBD active/active option is the latter.  The SAN option
was the former.  You seem to have misunderstood my comments.

Cheers,
Stan