[Samba] Samba using Virtual Servers (load balancing)

[Matt Schillinger]

I believe that others are correct (look at linuxvirtualserver.org for
documentation and discussions on Samba in a clustered mode) in that
CIFS' peer to peer concept is very stateful.. 

On the other hand, samba can be made 'Highly available' without alot of
trouble. I have a High Available File server (NFS and Samba)
configuration with 2 nodes, in an active-active configuration.

If one of the servers is hung up, or requires maintenance, its services
(including samba) will failover to the other node. If a client is in the
middle of a samba served file operation, they will see an error, but an
immediate retry of the file operation will work fine from the failover
server.  Because of CIFS' handling of files, it is very safe, because if
you are performing a file move, the original file is not deleted until
after a 'copy' is completed. So, if there's a failure, all you need to
do is restart the procedure.  


Matt Schillinger
mschilli at vss.fsi.com



On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 03:21, Leroy van Logchem wrote:
> Hello fellow samba users,
> 
> Our company uses samba for all fileshares/printing/PDC on
> two SUN E3500's. We like to replace these with about 10
> Linux 19" XEON (pizza)boxes. The question: Are there
> any implementation out there using a loadbalancing cluster
> doing samba?
> 
> A simple diagram of the setup I have in mind:
> 
> Users (+/- 500)
> |||
> Headnode(Director 1) - Headnode (Director 2)
> |
> Worknode - Worknode - Worknode ...
> |
> Large RAID5 NAS boxes (NFS only)
> 
> Thanks for any information/pointers in the right direction.
> (all directions are open: lvs,mosix,<???>)
> 
> 
> Regards,
> |^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> | Leroy(dot)vanLogchem (at) wldelft(dot)nl
> | Systems Group
> | WL | Delft Hydraulics - http://www.wldelft.nl
> |________________________________________
> 
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-- 
Matt Schillinger
System Administrator
FlightSafety International
mschilli at vss.fsi.com
314-551-8403