FreeBSD Storage Replication (HAST)

[bigb89]

Hello,

I've been looking for solutions in regards to setting up a highly available storage system. Here's my end goal: I would like to setup a FreeBSD iSCSI target (server), and provide iSCSI storage to virtual machines. Now the virtual machines need to be highly available, so I can't have the iSCSI server being a single point failure and that's why I need the iSCSI target to replicate to another server.

So far, I've been looking into HAST: http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/disks-hast.html

HAST seems like a promising solution. Have any of you guys worked with HAST before. If so, what are your thoughts on it as far as performance and reliability goes?

I've also thought about replicating ZFS snapshots to a different server, however, I'm not too sure how well that would work, specially being that I would need to keep the data as much in sync as possible.

I would like to hear your input in regards to building a highly available storage system/distributed filesystem.

 

[bigb89]

So, to update this thread, I decided to try out HAST and see how it went. The FreeBSD handbook provides a very straightforward HAST configuration and I was able to get HAST going without a glitch. At first, I decided to try UFS for the HAST disk file system, however, it seems like the performance for it wasn't as high as I expected (although, I didn't do any tunings, so I could probably get more juice if I played with it a bit more). So I decided to use ZFS for the HAST disk and was very impressed with the performance results and so far I'm enjoying it.

Right now, all that I have left to do, is configure either heartbeat or CARP so that failover can happen automatically when one of the nodes is down instead of me having to manually export/import the ZFS volumes and bring up services in the backup node.