Slightly OT: Distributed filesystems

Fri May 8 12:14:36 CDT 2009

Hi Eric,

GFS has fencing agents for the BMC (IPMI interface) and DRAC on most of our servers.

Although the BMC is shared with an onboard NIC, it has a separate IP and MAC so it shouldn’t cause problems with Oracle.  Also, it would only be accessed during fence operations, which should be rare.

If your servers have DRACs the fencing operations would be entirely separate from your onboard NICs.

Thanks, jacob

From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Eric.Jorgensen at westernunion.com
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 11:47 AM
To: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Slightly OT: Distributed filesystems

Hello, 

I have several 2950s grouped together in Oracle RAC clusters with a SAN used for shared storage.  I'd like to setup another LUN from the SAN and make it available on all nodes of a cluster.  I realize that Oracle RAC has this functionality already, but we are using ASM and I'd like the files to be readable outside of Oracle (i.e. to Netbackup), so I believe that using Oracle's tools will not work. 

Moreover, I've been looking at Redhat's Global Filesystem, but it appears that hardware is needed for fencing.  This seems to me to be overkill, as we already have Oracle handling all the clustering, and I'd rather not piggyback on the private NICs for example, for fear of breaking Oracle RAC. 

So what I'm looking for is a filesystem I can use to mount the LUN on each node.  Any pointers would be appreciated, especially any experience with GFS with non-hardware fencing, OCFS2 without ASM, etc. 

Thanks, 

Eric 

Eric Jorgensen
Sr. Systems Administrator, WU Corporate Systems
Office:  720-332-5615  Ext:  65615
Cell:  303-589-6630   FAX:  720-332-7627
Email:  eric.jorgensen at westernunion.com
12500 E Belford Ave M12SD  Englewood CO 80112 

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