DRBD9

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Introduction

DRBD® refers to block devices designed as a building block to form high availability (HA) clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via an assigned network. DRBD can be understood as network based raid-1. For detailed information please visit Linbit.

Main features of the integration in Proxmox VE:

  • drbd9/drbdmanage; drbd devices on top of LVM
  • All VM disks (LVM volumes on the DRBD device) can be replicated in real time on several Proxmox VE nodes via the network.
  • Ability to live migrate running machines without downtime in a few seconds WITHOUT the need of SAN (iSCSI, FC, NFS) as the data is already on both nodes.
  • LXC containers can use DRBD9 storage

Note:

DRBD9 integration is introduced in Proxmox VE 4.0 as technology preview.

System requirements

You need 3 identical Proxmox VE servers (V4.0 or higher) with the following extra hardware:

  • Extra NIC (dedicated for DRBD traffic)
  • Second disk, SSD, Flash card or raid volume (e.g. /dev/sdb) for DRBD
  • Use a hardware raid controller with BBU to eliminate performance issues concerning internal metadata (see Florian´s blog).
  • A functional Proxmox VE Cluster (V4.0 or higher)
  • At least 2GB RAM in each node

VM settings when running on top of DRBD

Network

Configure the NIC dedicated for DRBD traffic (eth1 in the current example) on all nodes with a fixed private IP address via the web interface and reboot each server.

For better understanding, here is an /etc/network/interfaces example from the first node called pve1, after the reboot: 

cat /etc/network/interfaces
# network interface settings
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
        address  10.0.15.81
        netmask  255.255.255.0

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address  192.168.15.81
        netmask  255.255.255.0
        gateway  192.168.15.1
        bridge_ports eth0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0

And from the second node, called pve2: 

# network interface settings
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
        address  10.0.15.82
        netmask  255.255.240.0

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address  192.168.15.82
        netmask  255.255.255.0
        gateway  192.168.15.1
        bridge_ports eth0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0

And finally from the third node pve3: 

# network interface settings
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
        address  10.0.0.83
        netmask  255.255.255.0

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address  192.168.15.83
        netmask  255.255.255.0
        gateway  192.168.15.1
        bridge_ports eth0
        bridge_stp off
        bridge_fd 0

Disk for DRBD

DRBD will search for the LVM Volume Group drbdpool. So you have to create them on all nodes.

I will use /dev/sdb1 for DRBD. Therefore I need to create this single big partition on /dev/sdb - make sure they exist on all nodes.

To prepare the disk for DRBD just run

NOTE: The logical volumes must have all the same size on each node! 

parted /dev/sdb mktable gpt
parted /dev/sdb mkpart drbd 1 100%
parted /dev/sdb p

Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 512GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  512GB   512GB                drbd

And create then logical volume dedicated for drbd

NOTE: The logical volumes must have all the same size on each node!

root@proxmox:~# vgcreate drbdpool /dev/sdb1 

 Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created
 Volume group "drbdpool" successfully created

root@proxmox:~# lvcreate -L 511G -n drbdthinpool -T drbdpool 

 Logical volume "drbdthinpool" created.

DRBD configuration

Software installation

Install the DRBD user tools on all nodes : 

apt-get install drbdmanage -y

Configure DRBD

To configure DRBD9 it is only necessary to run the following on node pve1: 

drbdmanage init
You are going to initalize a new drbdmanage cluster.
CAUTION! Note that:
  * Any previous drbdmanage cluster information may be removed
  * Any remaining resources managed by a previous drbdmanage installation
    that still exist on this system will no longer be managed by drbdmanage

Confirm:

  yes/no: yes
  Failed to find logical volume "drbdpool/.drbdctrl"
  Logical volume ".drbdctrl" created.
initializing activity log
NOT initializing bitmap
Writing meta data...
New drbd meta data block successfully created.
empty drbdmanage control volume initialized.
Operation completed successfully

Now add all nodes of the cluster to DRBD, with the following command (you should check login as root to these nodes work) 

root@pve1:~# drbdmanage new-node pve2 192.168.15.82
Operation completed successfully
Operation completed successfully

Executing join command using ssh.
IMPORTANT: The output you see comes from pve2
IMPORTANT: Your input is executed on pve2
You are going to join an existing drbdmanage cluster.
CAUTION! Note that:
  * Any previous drbdmanage cluster information may be removed
  * Any remaining resources managed by a previous drbdmanage installation
    that still exist on this system will no longer be managed by drbdmanage

Confirm:

  yes/no: yes
  Logical volume ".drbdctrl" successfully removed
  Logical volume ".drbdctrl" created.
You want me to create a v09 style flexible-size internal meta data block.
There appears to be a v09 flexible-size internal meta data block
already in place on /dev/drbdpool/.drbdctrl at byte offset 4190208

Do you really want to overwrite the existing meta-data?
*** confirmation forced via --force option ***

Do you want to proceed?
*** confirmation forced via --force option ***
NOT initializing bitmap
md_offset 4190208
al_offset 4157440
bm_offset 4153344

Found some data

 ==> This might destroy existing data! <==
initializing activity log
Writing meta data...
New drbd meta data block successfully created.
Operation completed successfully
root@pve1:~# drbdmanage new-node pve3 192.168.15.83

then add a DRBD entry to /etc/pve/storage.cfg like this:

NOTE1: Redundancy <Number> - this number can not be higher than the maximum number of your actual total nodes.

NOTE2:(if the file is missing, try adding some storage before like a local directory, and pve will create the file for you) 


drbd: drbd1
        content images,rootdir
        redundancy 3

Create the first VM on DRBD for testing and live migration

On the GUI you can see the DRBD storage and you can use it for as virtual disk storage.

NOTE: DRBD supports only raw disk format at the moment.

Try to live migrate the VM - as all data is available on both nodes it will take just a few seconds. The overall process might take a bit longer if the VM is under load and if there is a lot of RAM involved. But in any case, the downtime is minimal and you will see no interruption at all.

DRBD support

DRBD can be configured in many different ways and there is a lot of space for optimizations and performance tuning. If you run DRBD in a production environment we highly recommend the DRBD commercial support from the DRBD developers. The company behind DRBD is Linbit.

Recovery from communication failure

Integrity checking

  • You can enable "data-integrity-alg" for testing purposes and test at least for a week before production use. Don't use in production as this can cause split brain in dual-primary configuration and also it decreases performance.
  • It is good idea to run "drbdadm verify" once a week (or at least once a month) when servers under low load.
# /etc/cron.d/drbdadm-verify-weekly
# This will have cron invoked a drbd resources verification every Monday at 42 minutes past midnight
42 0 * * 1    root    /sbin/drbdadm verify all
  • Check man drbd.conf, section "NOTES ON DATA INTEGRITY" for more information.

Final considerations

Now you have a fully redundant storage for your VM´s without using expensive SAN equipment, configured in about 10 to 30 minutes - starting from bare-metal.

  • Three servers for a redundant SAN
  • Three servers for redundant virtualization hosts
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