I would like to avoid setting up a file server as back-end to my web server cluster, as this would give a single point of failure. Give we are running a iSCSI array of 8 nodes with redundancy and replication etc, I would like to take advantage of this.
It's the first time I'll be working with iSCSI from within Linux. A) is it possible and b) if it is, how do I best configure multiple machine to use the same iSCSI LUN / data store, as a "common share " . I assume I need a more advance file system that ext3.
iSCSI doesn't generally [1] work that way. You can't mount a volume in more than one place at once. That's the other difference between a "SAN" and a "NAS" [2]. If you have a storage appliance like a NetApp filer, there's a chance you can say "these disks are an iSCSI target", "these disks are NFS". A solution is to mount the LUN on one machine, and cluster that machine with a second using Heartbeat and a floating IP. Craig [1] Without black-magic clustering such as http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2009/02/19/9433146.aspx. [2] Other than the letters being backwards, of course.