Thread: Apache shared storage

Hi everyone, first welcome me here since im new to the forums.

Im looking into creating a load balanced cluster for Apache and I was wondering which shared storage would you recommend for storing the web site files.

NFS or iSCSI

I tried NFS, but I think it may have problems with locking and permissions.

iSCSI would probably cause corruption when shared between multiple Apache servers.

How about GFS2?

Any particular recommendation on which way to go for storing files?

Thank you guys

Hi,

GFS2 will work for this, but what cluster are you using , Redhat Cluster Suit or what ?

Originally Posted by Rahul.Patil

Hi,

GFS2 will work for this, but what cluster are you using , Redhat Cluster Suit or what ?

Im not using anything right now. I was wondering what advantages do you get from using GFS2 vs NFS, website data should be shared among Apache servers.

What kind of problems with NFS? I manage quite a few high trafficked ecom sites (50 millions+ of page view per monnth) based on NFSv4+RHEL+DRBD.

Originally Posted by nixcraft

What kind of problems with NFS? I manage quite a few high trafficked ecom sites (50 millions+ of page view per monnth) based on NFSv4+RHEL+DRBD.

But how many servers access the data/files as the same time?

I assume you have a high availability setup and you sync data from one NFS to the other so they are also in HA, with DRBD correct?

Otherwise why would you sync data data between servers if you are already using shared storage, in this case NFS?

DRBD was also an idea, but for a load balanced services where you keep adding servers I saw no point in mirroring data to each servers and have so many duplicates, better to centralize storage in a SAN.

No need to sync files. Data is stored on the NFS server. DRBD act as a fail over storage for master NFS server with the help of failover software. If a master NFS goes down, the traffic will be redirected to the slave NFS server and admin will be notified with problem. You can automate the entier process with software such as Puppet.

Edit: Read this article - HowTo: Run Network Service Per System / VM Instance To Improve Overall Security Of A Web Stacks (LAMP)