Has anybody tried or knows if it is possible to create a MD RAID1 device using networked iSCSI devices like those created using OpenFiler? The idea I'm thinking of here is to use two OpenFiler servers with physical drives in RAID 1, to create iSCSI virtual devices and run CentOS guest VMs off the MD RAID 1 device. Since theoretically, this setup would survive both a single physical drive failure as well as a machine failure on the storage side with a much shorter failover time than say using heartbeat. Or is this yet another stupid idea again from me? :D
On 28/06/2010 20:13, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:> Has anybody tried or knows if it is possible to create a MD RAID1 > device using networked iSCSI devices like those created using > OpenFiler?I dont use openfiler, but I run a mdraid-10 ( which isnt raid10 ), off locally mounted, remote storage exported over iscsi from centos-5 machines. What did you try ? how did you fail ? - KB
On 06/28/10 12:13 PM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:> Has anybody tried or knows if it is possible to create a MD RAID1 > device using networked iSCSI devices like those created using > OpenFiler? > > The idea I'm thinking of here is to use two OpenFiler servers with > physical drives in RAID 1, to create iSCSI virtual devices and run > CentOS guest VMs off the MD RAID 1 device. Since theoretically, this > setup would survive both a single physical drive failure as well as a > machine failure on the storage side with a much shorter failover time > than say using heartbeat. >I considered much the same a couple years ago, its certainly doable.... But, after playing with it a bit in the lab, I moved onto something more robust... the downside is A) iscsi on homebrew systems like openfiler tends to be less than rock solid reliable. and B) upon a 'failure', the rebuild times will require remirroring the whole volume, which is going to take quite awhile across two iscsi targets.
On 3/2/11, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at softdux.com> wrote:> I'm very interested to find out what happened with this project and > what you ended up doing?There were delays after changes after delays for that project that was meant to run on the VM setup. Spent more time hacking temporary solutions to their problems with NAS and such. So I haven't actually got this done. But if you can wait, I could probably answer you in about 4 weeks... when the hardware and fibre connectivity for the client's server room comes in.