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 continuously being updated; we (the authors) 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/.
This guide is organized in five parts and one appendix:
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.
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.
Part III, “Working with DRBD” is about managing DRBD, configuring and reconfiguring DRBD resources, and common troubleshooting scenarios.
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 Heartbeat cluster manager, but also advanced LVM configurations, integration of DRBD with GFS, and adding high availability to Xen virtualization environments.
Part V, “Learning more about DRBD” dives into DRBD's internals, and also contains pointers to other resources which readers of this guide may find useful.
Finally, Appendix A, DRBD system manual pages contains online versions of the Linux manual pages distributed with the latest DRBD version, for reference purposes.
Individual sections of this guide may be marked as “Draft”, such sections have been recently added and should not be considered authoritative.
An extended version of this guide is available to customers of LINBIT. Access to the extended version is included in LINBIT's support and training services. The extended version contains information on the following topics, not included in this version of the guide:
DRBD performance tuning and optimization,
creating and administering three-node replication configurations,
creating and administering configurations optimized for narrow-bandwith WAN replication,
various “hints and kinks” for advanced DRBD users.
Users interested in DRBD training or support services are
asked to contact <sales@linbit.com>.