Support Policies for RHEL High Availability - ctdb General Policies

Contents

• Overview
  • Applicable Environments
  • Useful References and Guides
  • Introduction
• Policies

Overview

Applicable Environments

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the High Availability Add-On

Useful References and Guides

• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters
• Support Policies for RHEL Resilient Storage
• RHEL 8: Chapter 8. Configuring an active/active Samba server in a Red Hat High Availability cluster
• RHEL 9: Chapter 8. Configuring an active/active Samba server in a Red Hat High Availability cluster

Introduction

This guide lays out Red Hat's policies applicable to the use of the Clustered Trivial Database for cifs exports - ctdb - in RHEL High Availability deployments. Users of ctdb in RHEL High Availability clusters should adhere to these policies in order to be eligible for assistance from Red Hat Support with the appropriate product support subscriptions.

Policies

Supported releases: Red Hat supports use of ctdb in all RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 releases, and in RHEL 6 Update 2 and later. That is, in RHEL 6 ctdb should be installed on a system that uses kernel, base operating system, High Availability, and (if GFS2 is used) Resilient Storage packages from RHEL 6 Update 2 or later.

Deprecation warning: As of RHEL 8.4, customers are advised to use ctdb in a RHEL High Availability or Resilient Storage cluster only under the following conditions:

• ctdb should be managed exclusively by the ocf:heartbeat:CTDB resource agent. It should not run outside cluster control -- that is, it should not run in standalone mode or be managed by init scripts or systemd services on each node. It also should not be managed by custom cluster resources (e.g., systemd-class resources).
• Volumes used by ctdb should contain either a GFS2 filesystem or (if High Availability is used together with Red Hat Gluster Storage) a GlusterFS filesystem.

ctdb deployments that do not meet these conditions are deprecated as of RHEL 8.4. Red Hat will cease supporting such deployments in a future major release of RHEL.

Typical samba policies and requirements apply: When using samba with ctdb to export data in an active/active manner using a RHEL Resilient Storage cluster, all other policies, limitations, and requirements for samba still apply. This may include, but is not necessarily limited to:

• Samba Support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Policies for exporting gfs2 via CIFS with ctdb: Requirements and limitations may apply to exporting contents of a gfs2 filesystem via CIFS and ctdb.

• See: Support policies - Exporting gfs2 contents via other protocols

No rolling updates of ctdb or samba or mixing versions: When using ctdb for CIFS exporting from a cluster, Red Hat only supports mixing versions of ctdb or samba packages if they come from the same minor release of RHEL - for example two different releases of ctdb from RHEL 7 Update 4. This should typically only be done on a short-term basis while applying "rolling updates". Mixing of releases of these packages from different RHEL minor releases is not supported, and discouraged, as it may result in unexpected behavior.