Hi everyone, We chose not to bond the NICs because we'd heard this does not scale the bandwidth linearly. To keep performance of the network high we wanted to allow the load to be spread across multiple links and multipath seemed the best way. The iSCSI setup suggested by the article http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/82284/san-on-the-cheap/page1.html uses one storage device as the primary storage and the second one as the secondary storage. The iSCSI target is presented via the first device and will failover to the second device. This allows for failure of either of the devices, but does not allow the storage load to be shared amongst the devices. By having the setup as described in http://www.ndsg.net.nz/ndsg_cluster.jpg/view (or http://www.ndsg.net.nz/ndsg_cluster.jpg/image_view_fullscreen for the fullscreen view) with multipath we provide two distinct paths between each server and each storage device, both of which can be used to send/receive data. By creating a RAID-5 array out of the iSCSI disks I hope I have allowed both of them to share the storage load. Our setup is intended to provide diverse protection for the storage system via: 1) RAID for the storage devices; 2) multipathing over the network - we've had dm multipath recommended instead of mdadm - any comments?; 3) a cluster for the servers using GFS to allow locking of the storage system; but also allows all the components to share the load instead of using a primary/secondary type setup (which largely "wastes" the scondary resources). We are going to use IOMeter to test our setup and see how it performs. We will then run the same tests with different parts of the network disabled and see what happens. As usual any comments/suggestions/criticisms are welcome. Thanks for all the discussion, it has been very useful and enlightening, Mike -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
