sles 11 sp1 vm's sharing storage on xen ha cluster

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SLES Virtualization
1

would like our virtual machines (sles11 sp1) hosted on xen ha cluster to
share storage via ocfs2
some background
our ha cluster uses ocfs2 to provide storage for virtual machine
images
we have a number of sles 11 vm’s, w2008server, and multiple oes2 vm’s
in the cluster
questions:
we would like a couple of our virtual machines to share storage
with ocfs2 volumes

what do the virtual machines need other than adding the ocfs2
packages?

do we need a cluster resource for the ocfs2 storage?
should there be some constraints at the cluster level as well?

is there any documentation on this that someone could point us to?

thanks
Wray

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3

Hi Wray,

the answers to your questions highly depend on the precise setup of
your cluster, as there are many ways to skin a cat.

If you’re already able to provide some storage resource (i.e. logical
volume / disk image) to all the VMs in question on every host of your
cluster, then all you need is OCFS2 inside the VMs.

If you need some mechanism to provide the shared storage only on the
Dom0 the VMs are running on, using a cluster resource (plus colocation
and/or grouping) could be a way to achieve this.

Regards,
Jens

–
from the times when today’s “old school” was “new school” :eek:

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4

Thank you Jens
Perhaps I need to clarify. I have OCFS2 running on Dom0 the virtual
machines are stored on OCFS2 volumes on an iscsi mounted san
i was initially over thinking this process, information is available at
oracle ocfs2-1_6-userguide.pdf

i have done the following:
create a vm configured with iscsi and multipath, install and configure
ocfs2 and then
have the vm mount the san by-id
ex /dev/disk/by-id/dm-uuid-mpath-222a70001551ff7b6

this at first glance works!

service o2cb status

Driver for “configfs”: Loaded
Filesystem “configfs”: Mounted
Stack glue driver: Loaded
Stack plugin “o2cb”: Loaded
Driver for “ocfs2_dlmfs”: Loaded
Filesystem “ocfs2_dlmfs”: Mounted
Checking O2CB cluster ocfs2: Online
Heartbeat dead threshold = 31
Network idle timeout: 30000
Network keepalive delay: 2000

Network reconnect delay: 2000
Checking O2CB heartbeat: Not active

mount -t ocfs2 /dev/disk/by-id/dm-uuid-mpath-222a70001551ff7b6 /mnt
i initially got the message
mount.ocfs2: Cluster stack specified does not match the one currently
running while trying to join the group
this has an easy remedy. I needed to reformat the ocfs2 volume for this
cluster and it works.

i was concerned that i would need some form of heartbeat and
distributed file lock installed. Maybe i still do?
i assume it uses the DLM in the kernel.

thank you
Wray

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