GFS2 hardware requirements

[Digimer]

On 12/05/2012 07:27 PM, William Muriithi wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I am planning to teach myself the in and out of GFS2. Now, problem is, I
> don't have a server class hardware and plan to use a couple of Dell
> Optiplex 745.
> 
> So I went looking for requirements and don't seem to find anything
> definitative. Do anyone know whether I need IPMI capable hardware or
> anything would work fine?
> 
> Would appreciate any pointer here.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> William

GFS2, itself, only requires shared storage of some type. However, the
distributed lock manager (DLM) requires fencing in order to put a
lost/failed node into a known state. That requires an external method of
forcing off the node, which IPMI can do. So if you have IPMI then you
are most of the way there.

As for shared storage, I use DRBD. GFS2 is only supported on clustered
LVM (which is normal LVM with it's locking swapped out for DLM). I've
run it without clvmd out of curiosity, and it works, but if you already
have DLM then it's trivial to use clvmd.

If you want to play with SAN-backed GFS2, you can easily use a 3rd
system and export storage from it using tgtd and mount it on the two
cluster nodes via iscsid. I'd do this after DRBD though, as DRBD is, in
my opinion, preferable over SANs in production.

I should how to create GFS2 as part of a larger tutorial on KVM clusters
that might help;

https://alteeve.ca/w/2-Node_Red_Hat_KVM_Cluster_Tutorial

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