Upgrade OCFS2

LVM for a cluster file system? I don't think that will work well. ;)

We use OCFS2 for hosting our web content on multiple Proxmox hosts running OpenVZ webserver containers. This way if one of our Proxmox servers goes down our other webservers running as containers will continue to be available.

We also use OCFS2 for storing the vzdump backups. This gives us a consolidated backup of all Proxmox server VMs.
 
smeat said:
LVM for a cluster file system? I don't think that will work well. ;)
Click to expand...

dietmar pointed this out for KVM. in your use case this makes no sense.

smeat said:
We use OCFS2 for hosting our web content on multiple Proxmox hosts running OpenVZ webserver containers. This way if one of our Proxmox servers goes down our other webservers running as containers will continue to be available.

We also use OCFS2 for storing the vzdump backups. This gives us a consolidated backup of all Proxmox server VMs.
Click to expand...

for KVM we do not need OCFS2. For containers, we hope we can get a container virtualization supporting our new storage model. in the meantime your approach seems reasonable, but as you know running OpenVZ OCFS2 is not the recommended way.
 
We don't host the containers on OCFS2, they are run on SAN hosted EXT3 LVM partitions. We use bind mounts with OpenVZ to mount the web content into the containers.

Let me see if I can give you an idea of what we are doing. This is an extremely simplified version of our setup.

Proxmox servers:
Has it's own EXT3 LVM partition that is hosted on our SAN, which is actually a Coraid AoE Storage Virtualizer backed by a pair of Coraid Storage Arrays.
Mounts /media/web_content also hosted on the SAN using the OCFS2 file system.
The /media/web_content directory is bind mounted into the OpenVZ containers using /etc/vz/conf/{vmid}.mount scripts.

Web servers:
Each web server is on a different Proxmox host and fronted by a load balancer that is also on different Proxmox hosts and set up with Linux HA.
The web servers access the web content at /var/www which is the same on all of them. They are able to read and write the same content across our whole cluster.

I would be able to do testing of OCFS2 if there is any way to backport the fixed versions into the Proxmox kernel. However, I don't have the expertise to do the backporting myself.


Thanks.
 
smeat said:
We don't host the containers on OCFS2, they are run on SAN hosted EXT3 LVM partitions. We use bind mounts with OpenVZ to mount the web content into the containers.

Let me see if I can give you an idea of what we are doing. This is an extremely simplified version of our setup.

Proxmox servers:
Has it's own EXT3 LVM partition that is hosted on our SAN, which is actually a Coraid AoE Storage Virtualizer backed by a pair of Coraid Storage Arrays.
Mounts /media/web_content also hosted on the SAN using the OCFS2 file system.
The /media/web_content directory is bind mounted into the OpenVZ containers using /etc/vz/conf/{vmid}.mount scripts.

Web servers:
Each web server is on a different Proxmox host and fronted by a load balancer that is also on different Proxmox hosts and set up with Linux HA.
The web servers access the web content at /var/www which is the same on all of them. They are able to read and write the same content across our whole cluster.

I would be able to do testing of OCFS2 if there is any way to backport the fixed versions into the Proxmox kernel. However, I don't have the expertise to do the backporting myself.


Thanks.
Click to expand...

ok, I understand your setup. as we do not have an immediate fix we need to investigate - are you in the position to pay this work?
 
We may be able to pay for work. I will have to check with my higher ups. Do you have any idea of an approximate cost at all?
 
smeat said:
We may be able to pay for work. I will have to check with my higher ups. Do you have any idea of an approximate cost at all?
Click to expand...

no really as we do not even know if it is possible in a reasonable time frame. go for a single support ticket and we take a look on it. you will get at least a useful answer from one of our developers (but no guarantee that it is possible ...).
 
tom said:
no really as we do not even know if it is possible in a reasonable time frame. go for a single support ticket and we take a look on it. you will get at least a useful answer from one of our developers (but no guarantee that it is possible ...).
Click to expand...


I ordered a single support ticket, we will see where this goes.


Thanks.
 
SamTzu said:
Interesting solution. What about the website's databases? Where did you place them? What about the bind mounts? I understand that is not easy to implement on OpenVZ.
Click to expand...

The databases are stored on redundant physical hardware separate from the Proxmox cluster. We are still evaluating the move to virtualization of the MySQL servers. Our MySQL servers use so much memory it would probably not be worth it to virualize them.

The bind mounts are handled using the standard OpenVZ bind mount scripts. One thing to remember with bind mounting file systems into OpenVZ containers is that if the source file system is not EXT3 you will not be able to do live migrations. However, non-live migrations with OpenVZ incur very little down time.

Let me know if you have any other questions and I can answer them for you.
 
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