geom_gate and geom_mirror status?

[Tomas Zvala]

Francisco Reyes wrote:
> Anyone has any experience with geom_gate, geom_mirror features in an 
> ISP style setup?
>
> At work we are testing them and so far it looks promissing, but we are 
> wondering how it behaves under heavy load. Would like to
> use it for replicating Maildir directories at an ISP in real time.
>
> Originally we were looking for DRBD in FreeBSD (http://www.drbd.org) 
> and searching for that we bumped into references to 
> geom_gate/geom_mirror.
>
About a year ago I tried setting up similar solution with FBSD and 
ggate/gmirror but even with generic kernel it wasn't stable enough for 
production usage. I tried to tweak around a bit but never succeeded in 
having it rock solid. Another problem is the need to do full resync 
after disconnect event (and with 900G disk it takes a looooong time even 
on 1GBps connection). So our mailserver runs gentoo linux with drbd for 
about 10 months now and works perfectly.

(just for clarification, we use the other box just as an offline backup 
-> fs is not mounted and we just have a manual failover in the event of 
master server failure)


Tomas