|
Excellent, thanks for the answer, that
makes it a lot clearer. So coupled with exclusion lists etc.. I
could have multiple machines connect to one LUN and each have its own logical
volume. Is there a concept of a “master” in the cluster or does it work in the
same way as tcp with an exponential backoff when the metadata is locked by a
host for changing. I am assuming that cluster aware locking would allow
server-a to create a new lv but not simalteneosly allowing server-b to create a
new lv too. I know should be experimenting with this
but will ask in the mean time while I wait for my “test lun”. If host A creates a lv on a shared storage
will it automatically be marked as only belonging to host A or is that
something you have to do by hand. I read somewhere in the man pages about tags
that you need to add to achieve such things. Regards From:
linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of Jonathan Brassow Clustering LVM (CLVM) provides a way to manage logical volumes in a
consistent way. By analogy, if you connect the same disk to two machines, put a file system
on it (like ext3), and mount the file system on both machines, you can expect
corruption. Both machines will be attempting to create/modify/read
metadata without the knowledge that someone else is doing the same... You
need a cluster aware file system in this type of scenario - like GFS. The
same thing is true of LVM... you don't want to have two machines sharing the
same volume group - extending/shrinking/creating/deleting logical volumes
without knowledge of the other machine... it would lead to corruption of your
volume group layout. This is what CLVM is all about. It is
especially useful when coupled with a cluster-aware file system, like GFS and
others. Active/Active setups are where CLVM is most useful.
Active/Passive setups can get away with a little less (http://sourceware.org/cluster/wiki/LVMFailover). In active/active environments, the concept of CLVM becomes even more
important when dealing with more complex RAID. For example, LVM mirroring
must be handled in a different way depending on whether a logical volume is
clustered or not. (This is handled transparently by (C)LVM.) This
is because mirroring creates its own metadata to track the degree to which the component
legs are in-sync... this status tracking must be cluster-aware or the state
will be corrupted. This is the reason why there is no snapshotting in
CLVM yet. The cluster-coherent version has not yet been written. brassow On Feb 7, 2008, at 10:36 AM, Gerrard Geldenhuis wrote:
Thanks, the “missing snapshotting” would
be a problem. I am still slightly unclear as to the goals of the clustering in
LVM… Regards From: linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com
[mailto:linux-lvm-bounces@redhat.com] On
Behalf Of Jonathan
Brassow The reason the results are likely so
sparse is because the two modes of operation (single machine and cluster) are
so similar. Once you've setup a cluster and installed
the lvm2-cluster rpm*, new volume groups that are created automatically receive
the "clustered" attribute. [Toggle the cluster attribute by
doing vgchange -c[ny] <vg>] The lvm commands stay the same as if
you were running them on a single machine.** brassow * Of course you could compile the sources
or use another install method. ** Some targets (like snapshots) are not
available when using LVM in a clustered mode. On Feb 7, 2008, at 8:38 AM, Gerrard
Geldenhuis wrote:
Hi I am after a bit more
documentation about the usage of the --clustered option in
vgcreate. At the moment I don’t
have a spare san drive with which I can experiment. My understanding is that
you would set this flag when different hosts(nodes) connect to the same storage
area typically a san with lvm configured. I am after a bit more
information describing this “clusterering” functionality in lvm and how/where
it is used. The man pages on lvm and commands is a bit sparse and I am trawling
through google results but not with great success at the moment. Regards _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ |
_______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
