This guide is intended to serve users of the Distributed Replicated
Block Device (DRBD) as a definitive reference guide and handbook.
It is being made available to the DRBD community by
LINBIT, the project’s sponsor company, free of
charge and in the hope that it will be useful. The guide is
constantly being updated. We try to add information
about new DRBD features simultaneously with the corresponding DRBD
releases. An on-line HTML version of this guide is always available at
http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/.
![[Important]](images/important.png) | Important |
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This guide assumes, throughout, that you are using DRBD
version 8.4.0 or later. If you are using a pre-8.4 release of DRBD
, please use the version of this guide which has been
preserved at http://www.drbd.org/users-guide-8.3/. |
Some sections in this guide are marked as Draft. They have been added
recently, and should not be considered authoritative. Feedback and comments on
these sections are particularly welcome and highly encouraged.
Please use the drbd-user mailing list to submit
comments.
This guide is organized in seven parts:
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Part I, “Introduction to DRBD” deals with DRBD’s basic functionality. It gives a short
overview of DRBD’s positioning within the Linux I/O stack, and about
fundamental DRBD concepts. It also examines DRBD’s most important
features in detail.
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Part II, “Building, installing and configuring DRBD” talks about building DRBD from
source, installing pre-built DRBD packages, and contains an overview
of getting DRBD running on a cluster system.
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Part III, “Working with DRBD” is about managing DRBD, configuring and reconfiguring
DRBD resources, and common troubleshooting scenarios.
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Part IV, “DRBD-enabled applications” deals with leveraging DRBD to add storage replication and
high availability to applications. It not only covers DRBD
integration in the Pacemaker cluster manager, but also advanced LVM
configurations, integration of DRBD with GFS, and adding high
availability to Xen virtualization environments.
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Part V, “Optimizing DRBD performance” contains pointers for getting the best performance
out of DRBD configurations.
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Part VI, “Learning more about DRBD” dives into DRBD’s internals, and also contains pointers
to other resources which readers of this guide may find useful.
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Part VII, “Appendices” contains two appendices. Appendix A, Recent changes is
an overview of changes in DRBD 8.4, compared to earlier DRBD
versions. ??? contains online versions of the Linux
manual pages distributed with the latest DRBD version, for reference
purposes.
Users interested in DRBD training or support services are invited to
contact us at sales@linbit.com or sales_us@linbit.com.