enbd for linux diskless clients (with failover?)

dsuchod <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.enbd.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi!! I just set up a nbd server and booted 15 diskless linux clients from
it. I was quite impressed from the performance (better and more efficient 
than my NFSv3 experience)!

After reliability and performance solved there would be next question of 
interest to me - poor mans high availability: Would it be possible to put 
two equal servers exporting just the same partion with the same content to
the clients, so if one of the server crashes the client is not doomed to
die too. The task is not to sync writes (the clients will see their
filesystems readonly), but just to get redundancy in cases of failing
of one crucial device ...

I would imagine some triangle setup:


	  master			  slave
	  server			  server
	* raid1 of local partition ---	* exporting local
	and nb0 (from slave)		partition (rw) to master
					via enbd
	* exporting local disk		* exporting local disk
	to clients readonly		to clients ro
		\			    /
		  \			  /
		    \			/
			client 1 ... N (N large ++100)
			* importing with one enbd 
			client both servers (ro)
			* (enable local caching)

Would that be possible (and stable)?

By now I was mounting ramdisk to directories which should be writeable. 
Other option would be unionfs (which is not production stable) or cowloop
(not tested yet in nbd setup). I read that enbd is able to do local caching
- where does that cache would go (into a tempfs in RAM ...)?

Thank you for any input!!

	Dirk
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