[Ocfs2-users] future of ocfs2

[Sérgio Surkamp]

> It would also be helpful to hear if anyone has done wide deployments
> of OCFS. (How many systems do you have running it?) Or any other 
> experiences/stories about working with ocfs2. I'm curious - how many 
> people on the oracle-l list are running ocfs2?
> 

Our story:

In 2006 we have the need to switch from FreeBSD to another
operating system with any filesystem that supported shared disk
concurrent. Since our storage support two connected servers and we was
working with a fail-over FreeBSD cluster that get from 40 minutes to
more than one hour to bring the unit again in case of failure, due to
filesystem checks.

So we evaluated RHEL (GFS) and SLES (ocfs2) for a month and half as
possible solutions to our problem. Our final decision was to adopt ocfs2
running with SuSE SLES for some reasons:

* Was stable on the linux kernel.
* Proved stable and secure on our tests.
* Was supported by the vendor without additional support contracts.
* Some other commercial stuff that I can't remember.

So in 2007 we deployed the solution in the production env. and in the
first days we hit a bug on NFS handling due to our FreeBSD NFS clients.
Mr. Sunil and his team helped on everything possible to find and fix the
problem.

Since then we are running very stable with our 2 node clustered
application servers, 4 FreeBSD NFS clients and 1 OpenSuSE NFS client. We
just rebooted the servers to upgrade from SLES SP1 to SLES SP2, witch
upgraded the OCFS2 version from 1.2 to 1.4 without problems.

I known its a small deployment, but our deployment case shows the
commitment of Oracle and SuSE (as Mr. Sunil added some SuSE employees
to fallow the case) in supporting users and solving problems quickly.

Cluster information overview:

Main objectives: Concurrent access to a shared disk; Fail-over NFS
servers; General file storage.
Nodes: 2
Storage size: 800GB
Storage connection type: Fibber-channel

Regards,
-- 
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