[Xen-users] Alternatives to cman+clvmd ?

[Christopher Smith <csmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I currently have a few CentOS 5.2 based Xen clusters at different sites. 
 These are built around a group of 3 or more Xen nodes (blades) and 
some sort of shared storage (FC or iSCSI) carved up by LVM and allocated 
to the domUs.
I am "managing" the shared storage (from the dom0 perspective) using 
cman+clvmd, so that changes to the LVs (rename/resize/create/delete/etc) 
are automatically and immediately visible to all the Xen hosts.
However, this combination seems to be horribly unreliable.  Any network 
hiccup more than a lost ping or two results in cman losing contact with 
the rest of the machines, which it frequently does not regain.  For 
example, failing one of the bonded NICs usually takes few seconds for 
everything to 'stabilise' again on the network, but in that time cman 
has lost contact with all the other nodes and often killed itself (or 
bits of itself) in the process.  Further, I have found I often have to 
reboot the machine completely to convince everything to start talking 
nicely again (why this is so, I have no idea, but on more than one 
occasion I've spent an hour stopping/starting cman and manually killing 
processes trying to get it working again, with no luck, then had a 
reboot fix everything instantly).

I am not interested in any fancy failover of domUs, or anything else 
cluster related on the Xen host side - we address HA and redundancy 
requirements within the VMs themselves.  The only reason I have this 
stuff setup at all, is to be able to use clvmd.  Is there any 
alternative out there that will let me keep using clvmd (or achieve 
similar functionality), without having to worry about cman constantly 
falling over ?
Cheers,
CS
--
Christopher Smith

UNIX Team Leader
Nighthawk Radiology Services
Limmatquai 4, 6th Floor
8001 Zurich, Switzerland
http://www.nighthawkrad.net
Sydney Fax:    +61 2 8211 2333
Zurich Fax:    +41 43 497 3301
USA Toll free:  866 241 6635

Email:         csmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
IP Extension:  8163
Sydney Phone:  +61 2 8211 2363
Sydney Mobile: +61 4 0739 7563
Zurich Phone:  +41 44 267 3363
Zurich Mobile: +41 79 550 2715

All phones forwarded to my current location, however, please consider 
the local time in Zurich before calling from abroad.

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE:   This email, including any attachments, 
contains information from NightHawk Radiology Services, which may be 
confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the 
use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended 
recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of 
the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received 
this email in error, please notify NightHawk Radiology Services 
immediately by forwarding message to postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and 
destroy all electronic and hard copies of the communication, including 
attachments.
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users