anti-cephalopod question

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On 07/28/2014 08:49 AM, Christian Balzer wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On Sun, 27 Jul 2014 18:20:43 -0400 Robert Fantini wrote:
>
>> Hello Christian,
>>
>> Let me supply more info and answer some questions.
>>
>> * Our main concern is high availability, not speed.
>> Our storage requirements are not huge.
>> However we want good keyboard response 99.99% of the time.   We mostly do
>> data entry and reporting.   20-25  users doing mostly order , invoice
>> processing and email.
>>
>> * DRBD has been very reliable , but I am the SPOF .   Meaning that when
>> split brain occurs [ every 18-24 months ] it is me or no one who knows
>> what to do. Try to explain how to deal with split brain in advance....
>> For the future ceph looks like it will be easier to maintain.
>>
> The DRBD people would of course tell you to configure things in a way that
> a split brain can't happen. ^o^
>
> Note that given the right circumstances (too many OSDs down, MONs down)
> Ceph can wind up in a similar state.


I am not sure what you mean by ceph winding up in a similar state.  If 
you mean regarding 'split brain' in the usual sense of the term, it does 
not occur in Ceph.  If it does, you have surely found a bug and you 
should let us know with lots of CAPS.

What you can incur though if you have too many monitors down is cluster 
downtime.  The monitors will ensure you need a strict majority of 
monitors up in order to operate the cluster, and will not serve requests 
if said majority is not in place.  The monitors will only serve requests 
when there's a formed 'quorum', and a quorum is only formed by (N/2)+1 
monitors, N being the total number of monitors in the cluster (via the 
monitor map -- monmap).

This said, if out of 3 monitors you have 2 monitors down, your cluster 
will cease functioning (no admin commands, no writes or reads served). 
As there is no configuration in which you can have two strict 
majorities, thus no two partitions of the cluster are able to function 
at the same time, you do not incur in split brain.

If you are a creative admin however, you may be able to enforce split 
brain by modifying monmaps.  In the end you'd obviously end up with two 
distinct monitor clusters, but if you so happened to not inform the 
clients about this there's a fair chance that it would cause havoc with 
unforeseen effects.  Then again, this would be the operator's fault, not 
Ceph itself -- especially because rewriting monitor maps is not trivial 
enough for someone to mistakenly do something like this.

   -Joao


-- 
Joao Eduardo Luis
Software Engineer | http://inktank.com | http://ceph.com


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