Berk Ulsoy

I am getting older. Once I was jumping in to the hell of alpha packages to use a new distribution. Now I found myself waiting for the Beta at least. Jaunty Jackalope Beta has been announced a fews days ago and it is downloadable for all variants of Ubuntu. Hooraaay, so far..
I am using an [...]

I was trying out new VMWare Server 2.0 for some time. It really has some nice features which I really miss. Check here for the list.
However, it has one big nasty problem:
It is totally unusable.
Right. I am not exaggerating. I am not trying to smash it. I wish I could say something better but it [...]

Linux and Open Source world has vast array of technologies to fit our needs. In these pages, I will define steps to build 4 node GFS cluster with LVS. Unfortunately there is not much howtos or guides to setup similar environments.


GFS is developed by Redhat and GFS configuration can be most easily done using GUI tools in Redhat Enterprise Linux. However, there are many reasons to deploy a Debian/Ubuntu instead of Redhat. (I will not discuss them here)
This setup has been tested on following hardware:

• 4x HP Compaq DL380 G5
• Intel Xeon quad core
• 16 GB RAM
• 2 x 146 GB SCSI internal disk
• 2 x Qlogic HBA
• 2 x Gigabit Ethernet
• MSA 2000 with 2x controllers
• 2x Fibre Switch

Our environment will end up having following features:

• All servers, running Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS 64-bit edition (Openvz enabled kernel)
• MSA2000 configured as single RAID6 drive
• GFS cluster setup with simple config, including quorum device and simple fencing
• RAID6 drive formatted as LVM volume and shared between 4 nodes using GFS
• LVS+Heartbeat to setup ip failover for web and mysql services
• Network interfaces are bonded to provide redundancy
• Two nodes will run web server and the other two nodes will use mysql

(db1, db2, web1, web2)

• Use OpenVZ for virtualization