On 11/18/2010 09:23 PM, Nicolas Ross wrote:
Hi again ! I am begining to play with my new servers. I got for starter 2 nodes (1u intel server platform, with a LSI Logic FC949ES FC card). I am like a child playing with his new toy at christmas... So, now I have a few points and questions. Sorry if it's long. 1. Raid sets So, I made up a 2-node cluster for the moment. I was able to bring up the cluster and make a GFS file system, in fact 2. We've made some test with different strategy of raid. Our first idea for the gfs was to use 5 1tb disks in raid 5. With that I got a 4 tb fs. It has been suggested previously that might not be a good idea. Our controler don't support directly raid 10 wich seems to be the consensus of a better setup. We will be making the 0 part on linux. I made 2 raid 1 sets of 1tb (2 disks) on our raid enclosure, and added them to a single vg. I created a lv on top of that, so I yield with a 2 tb fs. We don't plan on using striping on the lv (-i2) because of the overhead if we add more space we will need to add 2 sets of raid1. So we plan on making a "starter" gfs with those 2 sets (2tb total). It's nearly double the 1.1 tb we have now, so we'll start with that. Now, we made some write test with dd, and judging by the disk activity, all data was writen to the first disk (pair of) of the vg, and never the second one. I assume that once the first disk is full, it'll start writing to the 2nd one. In the long term, I don't beleive it'll be a problem, but I'd prefer if the data was written alternativly on both disks without using stripes. Is that possible ? I looked at the --alloc option to the vgcreate, but it doesn't seem to be that.
RAID 0 means that data should be evenly split between either array member. I would suspect a problem there. If the RAID controller is a simple on (I am not familiar with the model), I might suggest building the entire array in Linux. It would be interesting to see the performance difference, if any. Though I prefer that mainly because I am more familiar with mdadm, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.
2. Network setup. All our new servers have 3 nics, one being dedicated on to the mamagement module. I will be using the first one to make a private network that will be serving my services. In my new setup real routable ips will terminated at the router and will be nated to the private ones for eventual load-balancing. I will be using the second network on a different vlan and subnet for cluster communications. The management modules will be on that same vlan. So is this a good setup ? Should I be doing something differently ?
Sounds okay to me. I like having a dedicated subnet for data syncing, but what really matters is that cluster communication and fencing are separate from Internet traffic.
3. Deadlocks I found a small c program for testing the locks/s that is possible on a file accessed similtunously on many nodes. (It's ping_pong, some fo you might have used it). So, one of the parameters of that program is the number of nodes using that file +1. On one test, I used 2 in stead of 3 on one of the node. Both profram on both nodes seemed stuck, not killable, not even -9. So I must assume that they were in some kind of deadlock. dlm_tool deadlock_check didn't show anything, and I can't make heads or tails from gfs2_tool lockdump or what to do with it. I was forced to reboot (forcebly) one of the node. Most likely on my production environement we won't arrive to that situation. But I want to know what happed and what to do to prevent it or stop that kind of lock.
Do you have your fence devices configured and working properly? A failure to fence can hang a cluster. Also, are you using managed switches and have either IGMP snooping or spanning tree enabled?
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