DRBD in an active/passive & STONITH

DRBD
1

When setting up DRBD in an active/passive configuration with XFS as the file system, is it necessary to configure STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head)? Is there is much benefit? Or its not required.

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It’s not “required”, but there are certain situations where it might help you.

  • If a process accessing the XFS filesystem enters an uninterruptible sleep or zombie state, you could end up in a situation where cluster services are hung, but failover cannot happen because the hung process is holding the DRBD device’s mountpoint open.
  • In two node clusters you could end up with divergent data (split-brain) that would need to be resolved manually. In three+ node clusters you can use DRBD quorum to prevent this.

Because DRBD is a “shared-nothing” replicated storage solution, as long as you’re running in “active/passive” and don’t enable dual-primary mode, you don’t really run the risk of corruption without STONITH like you might with other shared storage solutions.

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