Best distribution to use for Xen / DRBD?

[dhicks]

Hello All,

 

We currently have an assortment of physical servers all running Xen on top of CentOS 5.1, with disk images provided by LVM and mirrored between machine with DRBD. This has been a fine, upstanding setup so far, managing to keep our data safe and our system running over the past 3 years or so through servers blowing power supplies, UPSes (UPSi? Just what is the multiple of UPS, anyway?) going up and down, etc.

 

I want to keep running a similar system, but it could all just do with tidying up somewhat. The DRBD mirroring works but, instead of adding robustness, it has instead meant that if either mirrored server goes down the VM fails, which is rather the opposite of what is meant to happen. I need to get a couple of machines sorted out and tested running Xen, DRBD and Heartbeat, preferebaly with instant-failover so if a physical machine goes down another instantly takes over.

 

What distribution would people recommend? I initially tried Ubuntu Server with Xen, but that was several years ago and it kept crashing. Anyone any luck with 10.04? How's about CentOS, or Redhat - is the CentOS project still going, I seem to remember there being some talk as to whether it was or not? Does CentOS / Redhat still include Xen, anyway?

 

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

What distribution would people recommend?

 

I've just re-checked DRBD's homepage, and seemingly it got integrated into the Linux kernel from version 2.6.33 onwards. Does that, therefore, mean that I don't have to worry about any reasonably up-to-date distribution, they will all be capable of running DRBD? That would be handy, as the main issue I had setting up our original server farm was getting Xen and DRBD both to work at the same time on the same server - I never did DRBD to work with the drivers for the SATA interface in the backup machine. Has anyone else got experience of running a recent Linux distribution and utilising both Xen and DRBD on a machine also running a software RAID (mdadm) array?

 

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David Hicks