[Samba] Samba Read-only redundancy

[Michael C. Wu]

Hi Everyone,

We are setting up some READ-ONLY Samba servers, mounted from the same
volume on a SAN.  The files are media files to be played out by
Windows Media Servers mounted on Win2003.

Here are my thoughts about possible configurations, would someone mind
letting me know what would the best option be?

A) DNS Round Robin
Have foo.domain resolve to 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3.

10.0.0.1
10.0.0.2
10.0.0.3 all have the same samba fileshare mount names configured.

Suppose WMS_server.domain connects to \\foo.domain\mount, and is
connected to 10.0.01, and 10.0.0.1 dies, WMS server retries, what
would happen?

B) Load balancing via VIP
Same setup, except that we give the VIP a DNS called foo-vip.domain
and let the Win2003 servers mount via \\foo-vip.domain

C) Samba HA with DRBD

What is the better route?  Would all 3 work? I'd like to make it the
simplest solution while remaining with redundancy to some extent.

Thanks in advance.

Michael