1.4. LVM Logical Volumes in a Red Hat High Availability Cluster The Red Hat High Availability Add-On provides support for LVM volumes in two distinct cluster configurations: High availability LVM volumes (HA-LVM) in an active/passive failover configurations in which only a single node of the cluster accesses the storage at any one time. LVM volumes that use the Clustered Logical Volume (CLVM) extensions in an active/active configurations in which more than one node of the cluster requires access to the storage at the same time. CLVM is part of the Resilient Storage Add-On. 1.4.1. Choosing CLVM or HA-LVM When to use CLVM or HA-LVM should be based on the needs of the applications or services being deployed. If multiple nodes of the cluster require simultaneous read/write access to LVM volumes in an active/active system, then you must use CLVMD. CLVMD provides a system for coordinating activation of and changes to LVM volumes across nodes of a cluster concurrently. CLVMD's clustered-locking service provides protection to LVM metadata as various nodes of the cluster interact with volumes and make changes to their layout. This protection is contingent upon appropriately configuring the volume groups in question, including setting locking_type to 3 in the lvm.conf file and setting the clustered flag on any volume group that will be managed by CLVMD and activated simultaneously across multiple cluster nodes. If the high availability cluster is configured to manage shared resources in an active/passive manner with only one single member needing access to a given LVM volume at a time, then you can use HA-LVM without the CLVMD clustered-locking service Most applications will run better in an active/passive configuration, as they are not designed or optimized to run concurrently with other instances. Choosing to run an application that is not cluster-aware on clustered logical volumes may result in degraded performance if the logical volume is mirrored. This is because there is cluster communication overhead for the logical volumes themselves in these instances. A cluster-aware application must be able to achieve performance gains above the performance losses introduced by cluster file systems and cluster-aware logical volumes. This is achievable for some applications and workloads more easily than others. Determining what the requirements of the cluster are and whether the extra effort toward optimizing for an active/active cluster will pay dividends is the way to choose between the two LVM variants. Most users will achieve the best HA results from using HA-LVM. HA-LVM and CLVM are similar in the fact that they prevent corruption of LVM metadata and its logical volumes, which could otherwise occur if multiple machines are allowed to make overlapping changes. HA-LVM imposes the restriction that a logical volume can only be activated exclusively; that is, active on only one machine at a time. This means that only local (non-clustered) implementations of the storage drivers are used. Avoiding the cluster coordination overhead in this way increases performance. CLVM does not impose these restrictions and a user is free to activate a logical volume on all machines in a cluster; this forces the use of cluster-aware storage drivers, which allow for cluster-aware file systems and applications to be put on top. 1.4.2. Configuring LVM volumes in a cluster In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, clusters are managed through Pacemaker. Both HA-LVM and CLVM logical volumes are supported only in conjunction with Pacemaker clusters, and must be configured as cluster resources. For a procedure for configuring an HA-LVM volume as part of a Pacemaker cluster, see An active/passive Apache HTTP Server in a Red Hat High Availability Cluster in High Availability Add-On Administration . Note that this procedure includes the following steps: Configuring an LVM logical volume Ensuring that only the cluster is capable of activating the volume group Configuring the LVM volume as a cluster resource For a procedure for configuring a CLVM volume in a cluster, see Configuring a GFS2 File System in a Cluster in Global File System 2 .

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