Mailing List Archive

need help in deciding on going with external metadata
Hi,
As per the docs
<https://linbit.com/drbd-user-guide/drbd-guide-9_0-en/#s-external-meta-data>,
between internal and external drbd metadata, external seems to be the
recommended way for us since we would be using DRBD to duplicate an
existing device that already contains data which we want to preserve. We
won’t have complete control on the disk so I am afraid that users might
overwrite if it’s DRBD internal metadata, hence again keeping the meta data
external seems to be viable. Some questions for which we would like to seek
expertise of this forum would be -

1. What do folks use for their external metadata?
2. Does external metadata need to be on an HA device?
3. What happens to the workload if the metadata device fails?
4. Can the external metadata be created and destroyed as needed, or does
it need to exist with the volume’s lifetime?
5. Is it possible to fence off internal metadata so other users cannot
influence it?
6. What are the performance implications of metadata device selection?
7. Does a ramdisk for metadata suffice? But I guess, it won’t sustain
reboots?

Thanks