share parttion between two rhel servers.
What is the best way to share partition within multiple rhel servers?
Responses
Mahesh, what is your purpose that you wish to achieve? Please explain in detail.
At the basic level this can be done using "nfs". https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/ch-nfs.html
A block device can be shared easily via remote storage such as fiber channel. Linbit sell a product called DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) which I believe enables this concept over a regular existing IP network.
However, the file system within that block device is not so easy to share. Most filesystems are designed to be mounted in one place at a time only. If you mounted an ext4 or XFS filesystem on two computers at the same time, you would corrupt the filesystem and lose data.
If you just wish to share files between two systems, then a network filesystem sharing method like NFS or Samba/CIFS should be used. Depending on your usage pattern, you may be better to create a dedicated file server and use multiple client systems to mount the share, or you might be able to just share from one system to the other(s).
If there is truly a need to share a block device and the filesystem within, you need to look into a clustered filesystem which is designed to be mounted on multiple systems at once. Our supported product is GFS2 in the High Availability Add-On. Various other vendors have clustered filesystems too.
DRBD is Free Software under the GPL, it's in the kernel so it has to be.
If I remember correctly, Linbit made their management interface proprietary and changed the license so that others could not re-sell or support it. I think that's why Alteeve switched from their traditional RHCS cluster to Anvil/Striker. It still uses DRBD but with a different management interface.
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