[Dovecot] Best Cluster Storage

[Jonathan Tripathy]

On 14/01/11 03:39, Eric Rostetter wrote:
> Quoting Henrique Fernandes <sf.rique at gmail.com>:
>
>> for drbd you only need a heartbeat i guess.
>
> Fencing is not needed for drbd, though recommended.
>
>> But to use gfs2 you need fence device, ocfs2 does not require once, 
>> like the
>> ocfs2 driver takes care, it reboots if it thinks it is desyncronized
>
> gfs2 technically requires fencing, since it technically requires a 
> cluster,
> and red hat clustering requires fencing.  Some people "get around this"
> by using "manual" fencing, though this is "not recommended for 
> production"
> as it could result in a machine staying down until manual intervention,
> which usually conflicts with the "uptime" desire for a cluster...  But
> that is up to the implementor to decide on...
>
>> []'sf.rique
>
I've actually been reading on ocfs2 and it looks quite promising. 
According to this presentation:

http://www.gpaterno.com/publications/2010/dublin_ossbarcamp_2010_fs_comparison.pdf

ocfs2 seems to work quite well with lots of small files (typical of 
maildir). I'm guessing that since ocfs2 reboot a system automatically, 
it doesn't require any additional fencing?

I was thinking of following this article:

http://wiki.virtastic.com/display/howto/Clustered+Filesystem+with+DRBD+and+OCFS2+on+CentOS+5.5

with the only difference being that I'm going to export the drbd device 
via iSCSI to my active-active mail servers.