[Ocfs2-users] 2 node cluster, Heartbeat2, self-fencing

[Matthias Dahl]

Hello everyone.

I am currently working on setting up new servers for my employer. Basically we 
want two servers, all of them running several VEs (virtual environments, 
OpenVZ) which can dynamically take over each others job if necessary. Some 
services will run concurrently on both servers like apache2 (load balancing), 
so those need concurrent access to specific data.

We had a close look at OCFS2 to be able to have our web data available on both 
machines (for example). (RAID1 on both servers, exported via iSCSI and OCFS2 
running on top of that) The problem we ran into was that if the connection 
between the two servers was lost, both would self fence which is not the way 
we want things to be. (high availability)

So after a lot of research, I discovered that Heartbeat2 now supports OCFS2 
and can take over the disk heartbeat job that OCFS2 requires. Unfortunately 
it seems like one needs patched OCFS2 kernel modules as well as patched 
userspace tools. I found the kernel part but I couldn't find any patches for 
userspace support.

Is there any time frame when those get merged into OCFS2 officially? And are 
those patches available somewhere on the net for download? If not, is there 
any other way we could setup our systems and don't have both machines self 
fence when the network connection goes down? It'd be nice if one could 
specify more tests to determine what server should self fence and what server 
should stay online.

Thanks for any help and any hints in advance.

Best regards,
Matthias Dahl