GFS2 and VM High Availability/DRS

Wes Modes <wmodes@xxxxxxxx> · Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:43:09 -0800



    Howdy, thanks for all your answers here.  With your help
    (particularly Digimer), I was able to set up my little two node GFS2
    cluster.  I can't pretend yet to understand everything, but I have a
    blossoming awareness of what and why and how.

    
    The way I finally set it up for my test cluster was

    
       LUN on SAN
       configured through ESXi as RDM
       RDM made available to OS
       parted RDM device
       pvcreate/vgcreate/lvcreate to create logical volume on device
       mkfs.gfs2 to create GFS2 filesystem on volume supported by
        clvmd and cman, etc
    
    It works and that's great.  BUT the lit says VMWare's vMotion/HA/DRS
    doesn't support RDM (though others say that isn't a problem)

    
    I am setting up GFS2 on CentOS running on VMWare and a SAN.  We want
    to take advantage of VMWare's High Availability (HA) and Distributed
    Resource Scheduler (DRS) which allow the VM cluster to migrate a
    guest to another host if the guest becomes unavailable for any
    reason.  I've come across some contradictory statements regarding
    the compatibility of RDMs and HA/DRS.  So naturally, I have some
    questions:

    
    1)  If my shared cluster filesystem resides on an RDM on a SAN and
    is available to all of the ESXi hosts, can I use vMotion and DRS or
    not?  If so, what are the limitations?  If not, why not?

    
    2)  If I cannot use an RDM for the cluster filesystem, can I use
    VMFS so vmware can deal with it?  What are the limitations of this?

    
    3)  Is there some other magic way using iSCSI connectors or
    something bypassing vmware?  Anyone have experience with this?  Can
    anyone point me to details docs on this?

    
    Wes

    
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