real-time mirroring of 2 partitions on 2 different servers

[arachnotron]

concept:
2 identical servers, one runs the production, the other one is on standby. They need to sync their production partition content to be able to switch their roles, production goes standby, standby goes production.

question:
how can that be realized? distributed disks, is that possible? where should i start to get more information to solve this task?

looking forward to your suggestions.

arachnotron

[mmealman]

A couple ways to handle this. One is through something called like a SAN, storage area network. It's expensive and I think overkill, but do a network search on it.

Under Linux you have distributed file systems, think of it like NFS but when the server goes down you can still access the files, and you have network block devices. A network block device allows you to sort of mirror a disk partition across a network, kinda like RAID 1.

http://linux-ha.org/ has general information on this stuff as does http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

For distributed filesystems you'll want to look at http://www.openafs.org/ and http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/

For network block devices I think http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/reisner/drbd/ is the most popular and probably what you're looking for if you just have 2 machines.

[arachnotron]

Thanks a lot, that gives me a jump start. Especially the DRBD solution looks interesting. I need to dig into the documentation and see if it fits.

arachnotron