[tlug] iSCSI, Network Block Devices, Virtual Machines

["Patrick Niessen" <tlug.niessen@example.com>]

Hi,

I am currently wondering about the captioned items, maybe someone has
experience with them and could shed some light on the situation.

1. iSCSI.  There seem to a few projects around that provide iSCSI for
linux, but my understanding is that its not part of the standard
kernel.  Is any of the implementations actually regarded as
"production level"?

2. Network Block Devices (eg. drbd).  Can anyone make a statement on
how reliable these are?  Does anyone use it to replicate data to an
off-site location?  Also did anyone run a virtual machine like VMWare
Disk files or something like that on top of DRBD?  maybe in this case
only syncronous replication would be acceptable as a slightly off
machine state would not be recoverable.

3. Finally, to get good data safety with few bucks I thought about
combining both, ie. use iSCSI to connect an application server to a
remote Linux server, which makes an drbd volume available as a target,
with changes being replicated to a standby host.



Any comments

Thanks

--
Patrick Niessen