[Ocfs2-users] OCFS2 and VMware ESX

[Haydn Cahir]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reply. How did you configure your RDM mappings? We have tried a few combinations already. We have three nodes and are trying to use a single OCFS2 volume. We are encountering a range of errors like VM's not starting when another node is already started (goes back to the RDM configurations we think), two of the nodes are able to edit files in the OCFS2 volumes but the third doesn't see any changes made by the other nodes and the OCFS2 volume switching to read-only due to errors on the volume.

We have tried running just two nodes and still get the problem where the volume will switch over to read-only. I will look into the time differences on the server, we normally have to make changes in the grub config and NTP settings to keep the time in synch.

FYI the version of OCFS2 on SLES 10 SP2 is completely different:

HIT-TCN1:~ # rpm -qa | grep -i ocfs
ocfs2-tools-1.4.0-0.3
ocfs2console-1.4.0-0.3

I can't even find reference to this version on the Oracle web site.

Cheers

>>> "Sedlock, Mark A." <Sedlock at rowan.edu> 07/29/08 12:42 PM >>>
We run a similar set up, SLES 10 SP1, we were ESX 3.0.x and are now 3.5.
We're running the version of ocfs2 that shipped with SLES 10 SP1.

4 nodes accessing raw mapped LUNs via ESX from an HP SAN on HP Blade
Servers. Qlogic HBAs, standard NICs; nothing special.

The biggest hurdle we ran into was time synch on the individual hosts
(VMWare ESX + some variants of Linux have an interesting clock tick
relationship which I still don't understand) that was causing some ugly
fencing.

It's been running well for about 8 months.  Overall we're pretty happy
with it thus far.  That said, we don't let ESX VMotion the cluster nodes
via DRS, but that's more because we haven't tested it.  The cluster is
used for Apache web hosting.

web7:~:%1003#rpm -qa | grep -i ocfs
ocfs2-tools-1.2.3-0.7
ocfs2console-1.2.3-0.7
ocfs2-tools-devel-1.2.3-0.7
web7:~:%1004#uname -a
Linux web7 2.6.16.53-0.16-smp #1 SMP Tue Oct 2 16:57:49 UTC 2007 i686
athlon i386 GNU/Linux
web7:~:%1005#cat /etc/SuSE-release 
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (i586)
VERSION = 10
PATCHLEVEL = 1
web7:~:%1006#

--mark
Mark Sedlock
Network and System Services
Rowan University