Upgrade DRBD to version 8.4.3 or superior on Proxmox VE 3.4 (DRBD 8.3.13)

lucaferr

Renowned Member
Jun 21, 2011
71
9
73
Hi!
I have 2 Proxmox VE 3.4 nodes with ZFS local storage mirrored through DRBD (Primary/Primary with 2 volumes) to guarantee complete redundancy. The nodes are linked with a dedicated 10Gbps on SFP+ and DRBD version is 8.3.13 (the version coming with Proxmox VE 3.4). Since I'm experiencing writes bottlenecks, I'd like to upgrade to DRBD 8.4.3 or superior, which should be much faster according to public benchmarks (https://blogs.linbit.com/p/469/843-random-writes-faster/).
Is there a safe procedure to upgrade while maintaining all data and configurations intact?
Thank you very much!
Luca
 
Last edited:
Can't remember, did i had vm's down or not.
If you don't use openvz containers:
Upgrade kernel to 3.10.0-5-pve ( it has drbd 8.4.3 module, some newer kernels might have v9 ) from public repo.
After that you need to compile utilities 8.4.3 version. (can compile on one node and copy deb package to other)

_______________________
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]mkdir drbd[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]cd drbd[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]git clone git://git.drbd.org/drbd-8.4.git[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]cd drbd-8.4[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]git checkout drbd-8.4.3[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b -uc[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]cd ..[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]dpkg -i drbd8-utils_8.4.3-0_amd64.deb
_______________________

Reboot.
[/FONT]
 
3.10.0-5-pve is very old, use latest 3.10.0-11-pve
 
Had a quick check, anything below
pve-kernel-3.10.0 (3.10.0-31) unstable; urgency=medium

* include latest DRBD 9.0 driver

should be fine.
 
Last edited:
I do use OpenVZ containers. As recommended in the PVE wiki, I followed these steps after installation: http://www.nedproductions.biz/wiki/...plicated-storage-available-for-openvz-as-well
Does this change anything in the upgrade procedure?
Thank you very much!

DRBD has two parts, kernel driver and utilities. I am not aware of older pve-kernel with 8.4.3 version driver.
Upgrade process would have one more part.
You would need to build kernel driver from source.
It looks like it is built as module in proxmox kernel.
Read this and this.

(Building the DRBD kernel module requires that you configured DRBD with the --with-km option, which is disabled by default.)
 

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