Would ZFS and gmirror work well together in a two-node failover cluster?

[Maurice Volaski]

>Have you considered ZFS snapshots and send/receive? This would allow 
>you to maintain a consistent (from ZFS' perspective) replica in near 
>real-time (depending on how frequently the snapshots are taken).

Thanks for your suggestion.

I'm not sure how that would work in practice either, but is 
potentially interesting to consider.

For one thing, how small can small window of data be, something 
measured in minutes or hours? And this would be a system that could 
be moving 100 MB+ per second, so the data could get outdated quickly.

Plus, I'm looking for the failover to be automatic and near 
instantaneous. That is, if I pull the power cord on the primary, 
could the secondary go hot in under a minute?

That's the way it works with heartbeat and DRBD on Linux.

Solaris on x86 has a mechanism very similar to DRBD called AVS, 
although it's only a little more complex, it's Solaris itself that is 
so different (and perhaps more complex) than Linux that I was 
thinking FreeBSD might be an alternative.
-- 

Maurice Volaski, mvolaski at aecom.yu.edu
Computing Support, Rose F. Kennedy Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University