Provided by: drbd-utils_9.22.0-1.1_amd64 
NAME
drbd.conf - Configuration file for DRBD's devices
INTRODUCTION
The file /etc/drbd.conf is read by drbdadm.
The file format was designed as to allow to have a verbatim copy of the file on both nodes of the
cluster. It is highly recommended to do so in order to keep your configuration manageable. The file
/etc/drbd.conf should be the same on both nodes of the cluster. Changes to /etc/drbd.conf do not apply
immediately.
By convention the main config contains two include statements. The first one includes the file
/etc/drbd.d/global_common.conf, the second one all file with a .res suffix.
resource r0 {
net {
protocol C;
cram-hmac-alg sha1;
shared-secret "FooFunFactory";
}
disk {
resync-rate 10M;
}
on alice {
volume 0 {
device minor 1;
disk /dev/sda7;
meta-disk internal;
}
address 10.1.1.31:7789;
}
on bob {
volume 0 {
device minor 1;
disk /dev/sda7;
meta-disk internal;
}
address 10.1.1.32:7789;
}
}
In this example, there is a single DRBD resource (called r0) which uses protocol C for the connection
between its devices. It contains a single volume which runs on host alice uses /dev/drbd1 as devices for
its application, and /dev/sda7 as low-level storage for the data. The IP addresses are used to specify
the networking interfaces to be used. An eventually running resync process should use about
10MByte/second of IO bandwidth. This resync-rate statement is valid for volume 0, but would also be valid
for further volumes. In this example it assigns full 10MByte/second to each volume.
There may be multiple resource sections in a single drbd.conf file. For more examples, please have a look
at the DRBD User's Guide[1].
FILE FORMAT
The file consists of sections and parameters. A section begins with a keyword, sometimes an additional
name, and an opening brace (“{”). A section ends with a closing brace (“}”. The braces enclose the
parameters.
section [name] { parameter value; [...] }
A parameter starts with the identifier of the parameter followed by whitespace. Every subsequent
character is considered as part of the parameter's value. A special case are Boolean parameters which
consist only of the identifier. Parameters are terminated by a semicolon (“;”).
Some parameter values have default units which might be overruled by K, M or G. These units are defined
in the usual way (K = 2^10 = 1024, M = 1024 K, G = 1024 M).
Comments may be placed into the configuration file and must begin with a hash sign (“#”). Subsequent
characters are ignored until the end of the line.
Sections
skip
Comments out chunks of text, even spanning more than one line. Characters between the keyword skip
and the opening brace (“{”) are ignored. Everything enclosed by the braces is skipped. This comes in
handy, if you just want to comment out some 'resource [name] {...}' section: just precede it with
'skip'.
global
Configures some global parameters. Currently only minor-count, dialog-refresh,
disable-ip-verification and usage-count are allowed here. You may only have one global section,
preferably as the first section.
common
All resources inherit the options set in this section. The common section might have a startup, a
options, a handlers, a net and a disk section.
resource name
Configures a DRBD resource. Each resource section needs to have two (or more) on host sections and
may have a startup, a options, a handlers, a net and a disk section. It might contain volumes
sections.
on host-name
Carries the necessary configuration parameters for a DRBD device of the enclosing resource.
host-name is mandatory and must match the Linux host name (uname -n) of one of the nodes. You may
list more than one host name here, in case you want to use the same parameters on several hosts
(you'd have to move the IP around usually). Or you may list more than two such sections.
resource r1 {
protocol C;
device minor 1;
meta-disk internal;
on alice bob {
address 10.2.2.100:7801;
disk /dev/mapper/some-san;
}
on charlie {
address 10.2.2.101:7801;
disk /dev/mapper/other-san;
}
on daisy {
address 10.2.2.103:7801;
disk /dev/mapper/other-san-as-seen-from-daisy;
}
}
See also the floating section keyword. Required statements in this section: address and volume. Note
for backward compatibility and convenience it is valid to embed the statements of a single volume
directly into the host section.
volume vnr
Defines a volume within a connection. The minor numbers of a replicated volume might be different on
different hosts, the volume number (vnr) is what groups them together. Required parameters in this
section: device, disk, meta-disk.
stacked-on-top-of resource
For a stacked DRBD setup (3 or 4 nodes), a stacked-on-top-of is used instead of an on section.
Required parameters in this section: device and address.
floating AF addr:port
Carries the necessary configuration parameters for a DRBD device of the enclosing resource. This
section is very similar to the on section. The difference to the on section is that the matching of
the host sections to machines is done by the IP-address instead of the node name. Required parameters
in this section: device, disk, meta-disk, all of which may be inherited from the resource section, in
which case you may shorten this section down to just the address identifier.
resource r2 {
protocol C;
device minor 2;
disk /dev/sda7;
meta-disk internal;
# short form, device, disk and meta-disk inherited
floating 10.1.1.31:7802;
# longer form, only device inherited
floating 10.1.1.32:7802 {
disk /dev/sdb;
meta-disk /dev/sdc8;
}
}
disk
This section is used to fine tune DRBD's properties in respect to the low level storage. Please refer
to drbdsetup(8) for detailed description of the parameters. Optional parameters: on-io-error, size,
fencing, disk-barrier, disk-flushes, disk-drain, md-flushes, max-bio-bvecs, resync-rate,
resync-after, al-extents, al-updates, c-plan-ahead, c-fill-target, c-delay-target, c-max-rate,
c-min-rate, disk-timeout, discard-zeroes-if-aligned, rs-discard-granularity, read-balancing.
net
This section is used to fine tune DRBD's properties. Please refer to drbdsetup(8) for a detailed
description of this section's parameters. Optional parameters: protocol, sndbuf-size, rcvbuf-size,
timeout, connect-int, ping-int, ping-timeout, max-buffers, max-epoch-size, ko-count,
allow-two-primaries, cram-hmac-alg, shared-secret, after-sb-0pri, after-sb-1pri, after-sb-2pri,
data-integrity-alg, no-tcp-cork, on-congestion, congestion-fill, congestion-extents, verify-alg,
use-rle, csums-alg, socket-check-timeout.
startup
This section is used to fine tune DRBD's properties. Please refer to drbdsetup(8) for a detailed
description of this section's parameters. Optional parameters: wfc-timeout, degr-wfc-timeout,
outdated-wfc-timeout, wait-after-sb, stacked-timeouts and become-primary-on.
options
This section is used to fine tune the behaviour of the resource object. Please refer to drbdsetup(8)
for a detailed description of this section's parameters. Optional parameters: cpu-mask, and
on-no-data-accessible.
handlers
In this section you can define handlers (executables) that are started by the DRBD system in response
to certain events. Optional parameters: pri-on-incon-degr, pri-lost-after-sb, pri-lost, fence-peer
(formerly oudate-peer), local-io-error, initial-split-brain, split-brain, before-resync-target,
after-resync-target.
The interface is done via environment variables:
• DRBD_RESOURCE is the name of the resource
• DRBD_MINOR is the minor number of the DRBD device, in decimal.
• DRBD_CONF is the path to the primary configuration file; if you split your configuration into
multiple files (e.g. in /etc/drbd.conf.d/), this will not be helpful.
• DRBD_PEER_AF , DRBD_PEER_ADDRESS , DRBD_PEERS are the address family (e.g. ipv6), the peer's
address and hostnames.
DRBD_PEER is deprecated.
Please note that not all of these might be set for all handlers, and that some values might not be
useable for a floating definition.
Parameters
minor-count count
count may be a number from 1 to 1048575.
Minor-count is a sizing hint for DRBD. It helps to right-size various memory pools. It should be set
in the in the same order of magnitude than the actual number of minors you use. Per default the
module loads with 11 more resources than you have currently in your config but at least 32.
dialog-refresh time
time may be 0 or a positive number.
The user dialog redraws the second count every time seconds (or does no redraws if time is 0). The
default value is 1.
disable-ip-verification
Use disable-ip-verification if, for some obscure reasons, drbdadm can/might not use ip or ifconfig to
do a sanity check for the IP address. You can disable the IP verification with this option.
udev-always-use-vnr
When udev asks drbdadm for a list of device related symlinks, drbdadm would suggest symlinks with
differing naming conventions, depending on whether the resource has explicit volume VNR { }
definitions, or only one single volume with the implicit volume number 0:
# implicit single volume without "volume 0 {}" block
DEVICE=drbd<minor>
SYMLINK_BY_RES=drbd/by-res/<resource-name>
# explicit volume definition: volume VNR { }
DEVICE=drbd<minor>
SYMLINK_BY_RES=drbd/by-res/<resource-name>/VNR
If you define this parameter in the global section, drbdadm will always add the .../VNR part, and
will not care for whether the volume definition was implicit or explicit.
For legacy backward compatibility, this is off by default, but we do recommend to enable it.
usage-count val
Please participate in DRBD's online usage counter[2]. The most convenient way to do so is to set this
option to yes. Valid options are: yes, no and ask.
protocol prot-id
On the TCP/IP link the specified protocol is used. Valid protocol specifiers are A, B, and C.
Protocol A: write IO is reported as completed, if it has reached local disk and local TCP send
buffer.
Protocol B: write IO is reported as completed, if it has reached local disk and remote buffer cache.
Protocol C: write IO is reported as completed, if it has reached both local and remote disk.
device name minor nr
The name of the block device node of the resource being described. You must use this device with your
application (file system) and you must not use the low level block device which is specified with the
disk parameter.
One can ether omit the name or minor and the minor number. If you omit the name a default of
/dev/drbdminor will be used.
Udev will create additional symlinks in /dev/drbd/by-res and /dev/drbd/by-disk.
disk name
DRBD uses this block device to actually store and retrieve the data. Never access such a device while
DRBD is running on top of it. This also holds true for dumpe2fs(8) and similar commands.
address AF addr:port
A resource needs one IP address per device, which is used to wait for incoming connections from the
partner device respectively to reach the partner device. AF must be one of ipv4, ipv6, ssocks or sdp
(for compatibility reasons sci is an alias for ssocks). It may be omited for IPv4 addresses. The
actual IPv6 address that follows the ipv6 keyword must be placed inside brackets: ipv6
[fd01:2345:6789:abcd::1]:7800.
Each DRBD resource needs a TCP port which is used to connect to the node's partner device. Two
different DRBD resources may not use the same addr:port combination on the same node.
meta-disk internal,
meta-disk device,
meta-disk device [index]
Internal means that the last part of the backing device is used to store the meta-data. The size of
the meta-data is computed based on the size of the device.
When a device is specified, either with or without an index, DRBD stores the meta-data on this
device. Without index, the size of the meta-data is determined by the size of the data device. This
is usually used with LVM, which allows to have many variable sized block devices. The meta-data size
is 36kB + Backing-Storage-size / 32k, rounded up to the next 4kb boundary. (Rule of the thumb:
32kByte per 1GByte of storage, rounded up to the next MB.)
When an index is specified, each index number refers to a fixed slot of meta-data of 128 MB, which
allows a maximum data size of 4 TiB. This way, multiple DBRD devices can share the same meta-data
device. For example, if /dev/sde6[0] and /dev/sde6[1] are used, /dev/sde6 must be at least 256 MB
big. Because of the hard size limit, use of meta-disk indexes is discouraged.
on-io-error handler
handler is taken, if the lower level device reports io-errors to the upper layers.
handler may be pass_on, call-local-io-error or detach.
pass_on: The node downgrades the disk status to inconsistent, marks the erroneous block as
inconsistent in the bitmap and retries the IO on the remote node.
call-local-io-error: Call the handler script local-io-error.
detach: The node drops its low level device, and continues in diskless mode.
fencing fencing_policy
By fencing we understand preventive measures to avoid situations where both nodes are primary and
disconnected (AKA split brain).
Valid fencing policies are:
dont-care
This is the default policy. No fencing actions are taken.
resource-only
If a node becomes a disconnected primary, it tries to fence the peer's disk. This is done by
calling the fence-peer handler. The handler is supposed to reach the other node over alternative
communication paths and call 'drbdadm outdate res' there.
resource-and-stonith
If a node becomes a disconnected primary, it freezes all its IO operations and calls its
fence-peer handler. The fence-peer handler is supposed to reach the peer over alternative
communication paths and call 'drbdadm outdate res' there. In case it cannot reach the peer it
should stonith the peer. IO is resumed as soon as the situation is resolved. In case your handler
fails, you can resume IO with the resume-io command.
disk-barrier,
disk-flushes,
disk-drain
DRBD has four implementations to express write-after-write dependencies to its backing storage
device. DRBD will use the first method that is supported by the backing storage device and that is
not disabled. By default the flush method is used.
Since drbd-8.4.2 disk-barrier is disabled by default because since linux-2.6.36 (or 2.6.32 RHEL6)
there is no reliable way to determine if queuing of IO-barriers works. Dangerous only enable if you
are told so by one that knows for sure.
When selecting the method you should not only base your decision on the measurable performance. In
case your backing storage device has a volatile write cache (plain disks, RAID of plain disks) you
should use one of the first two. In case your backing storage device has battery-backed write cache
you may go with option 3. Option 4 (disable everything, use "none") is dangerous on most IO stacks,
may result in write-reordering, and if so, can theoretically be the reason for data corruption, or
disturb the DRBD protocol, causing spurious disconnect/reconnect cycles. Do not use no-disk-drain.
Unfortunately device mapper (LVM) might not support barriers.
The letter after "wo:" in /proc/drbd indicates with method is currently in use for a device: b, f, d,
n. The implementations are:
barrier
The first requires that the driver of the backing storage device support barriers (called 'tagged
command queuing' in SCSI and 'native command queuing' in SATA speak). The use of this method can
be enabled by setting the disk-barrier options to yes.
flush
The second requires that the backing device support disk flushes (called 'force unit access' in
the drive vendors speak). The use of this method can be disabled setting disk-flushes to no.
drain
The third method is simply to let write requests drain before write requests of a new reordering
domain are issued. This was the only implementation before 8.0.9.
none
The fourth method is to not express write-after-write dependencies to the backing store at all,
by also specifying no-disk-drain. This is dangerous on most IO stacks, may result in
write-reordering, and if so, can theoretically be the reason for data corruption, or disturb the
DRBD protocol, causing spurious disconnect/reconnect cycles. Do not use no-disk-drain.
md-flushes
Disables the use of disk flushes and barrier BIOs when accessing the meta data device. See the notes
on disk-flushes.
max-bio-bvecs
In some special circumstances the device mapper stack manages to pass BIOs to DRBD that violate the
constraints that are set forth by DRBD's merge_bvec() function and which have more than one bvec. A
known example is: phys-disk -> DRBD -> LVM -> Xen -> misaligned partition (63) -> DomU FS. Then you
might see "bio would need to, but cannot, be split:" in the Dom0's kernel log.
The best workaround is to proper align the partition within the VM (E.g. start it at sector 1024).
This costs 480 KiB of storage. Unfortunately the default of most Linux partitioning tools is to start
the first partition at an odd number (63). Therefore most distribution's install helpers for virtual
linux machines will end up with misaligned partitions. The second best workaround is to limit DRBD's
max bvecs per BIO (= max-bio-bvecs) to 1, but that might cost performance.
The default value of max-bio-bvecs is 0, which means that there is no user imposed limitation.
disk-timeout
If the lower-level device on which a DRBD device stores its data does not finish an I/O request
within the defined disk-timeout, DRBD treats this as a failure. The lower-level device is detached,
and the device's disk state advances to Diskless. If DRBD is connected to one or more peers, the
failed request is passed on to one of them.
This option is dangerous and may lead to kernel panic!
"Aborting" requests, or force-detaching the disk, is intended for completely blocked/hung local
backing devices which do no longer complete requests at all, not even do error completions. In this
situation, usually a hard-reset and failover is the only way out.
By "aborting", basically faking a local error-completion, we allow for a more graceful swichover by
cleanly migrating services. Still the affected node has to be rebooted "soon".
By completing these requests, we allow the upper layers to re-use the associated data pages.
If later the local backing device "recovers", and now DMAs some data from disk into the original
request pages, in the best case it will just put random data into unused pages; but typically it will
corrupt meanwhile completely unrelated data, causing all sorts of damage.
Which means delayed successful completion, especially for READ requests, is a reason to panic(). We
assume that a delayed *error* completion is OK, though we still will complain noisily about it.
The default value of disk-timeout is 0, which stands for an infinite timeout. Timeouts are specified
in units of 0.1 seconds. This option is available since DRBD 8.3.12.
discard-zeroes-if-aligned {yes | no}
There are several aspects to discard/trim/unmap support on linux block devices. Even if discard is
supported in general, it may fail silently, or may partially ignore discard requests. Devices also
announce whether reading from unmapped blocks returns defined data (usually zeroes), or undefined
data (possibly old data, possibly garbage).
If on different nodes, DRBD is backed by devices with differing discard characteristics, discards may
lead to data divergence (old data or garbage left over on one backend, zeroes due to unmapped areas
on the other backend). Online verify would now potentially report tons of spurious differences. While
probably harmless for most use cases (fstrim on a file system), DRBD cannot have that.
To play safe, we have to disable discard support, if our local backend (on a Primary) does not
support "discard_zeroes_data=true". We also have to translate discards to explicit zero-out on the
receiving side, unless the receiving side (Secondary) supports "discard_zeroes_data=true", thereby
allocating areas what were supposed to be unmapped.
There are some devices (notably the LVM/DM thin provisioning) that are capable of discard, but
announce discard_zeroes_data=false. In the case of DM-thin, discards aligned to the chunk size will
be unmapped, and reading from unmapped sectors will return zeroes. However, unaligned partial head or
tail areas of discard requests will be silently ignored.
If we now add a helper to explicitly zero-out these unaligned partial areas, while passing on the
discard of the aligned full chunks, we effectively achieve discard_zeroes_data=true on such devices.
Setting discard-zeroes-if-aligned to yes will allow DRBD to use discards, and to announce
discard_zeroes_data=true, even on backends that announce discard_zeroes_data=false.
Setting discard-zeroes-if-aligned to no will cause DRBD to always fall-back to zero-out on the
receiving side, and to not even announce discard capabilities on the Primary, if the respective
backend announces discard_zeroes_data=false.
We used to ignore the discard_zeroes_data setting completely. To not break established and expected
behaviour, and suddenly cause fstrim on thin-provisioned LVs to run out-of-space instead of freeing
up space, the default value is yes.
This option is available since 8.4.7.
--disable-write-same {yes | no}
Some disks announce WRITE_SAME support to the kernel but fail with an I/O error upon actually
receiving such a request. This mostly happens when using virtualized disks -- notably, this behavior
has been observed with VMware's virtual disks.
When disable-write-same is set to yes, WRITE_SAME detection is manually overriden and support is
disabled.
The default value of disable-write-same is no. This option is available since 8.4.7.
read-balancing method
The supported methods for load balancing of read requests are prefer-local, prefer-remote,
round-robin, least-pending, when-congested-remote, 32K-striping, 64K-striping, 128K-striping,
256K-striping, 512K-striping and 1M-striping.
The default value of read-balancing is prefer-local. This option is available since 8.4.1.
rs-discard-granularity byte
When rs-discard-granularity is set to a non zero, positive value then DRBD tries to do a resync
operation in requests of this size. In case such a block contains only zero bytes on the sync source
node, the sync target node will issue a discard/trim/unmap command for the area.
The value is constrained by the discard granularity of the backing block device. In case
rs-discard-granularity is not a multiplier of the discard granularity of the backing block device
DRBD rounds it up. The feature only gets active if the backing block device reads back zeroes after a
discard command.
The default value of rs-discard-granularity is 0. This option is available since 8.4.7.
sndbuf-size size
size is the size of the TCP socket send buffer. The default value is 0, i.e. autotune. You can
specify smaller or larger values. Larger values are appropriate for reasonable write throughput with
protocol A over high latency networks. Values below 32K do not make sense. Since 8.0.13 resp. 8.2.7,
setting the size value to 0 means that the kernel should autotune this.
rcvbuf-size size
size is the size of the TCP socket receive buffer. The default value is 0, i.e. autotune. You can
specify smaller or larger values. Usually this should be left at its default. Setting the size value
to 0 means that the kernel should autotune this.
timeout time
If the partner node fails to send an expected response packet within time tenths of a second, the
partner node is considered dead and therefore the TCP/IP connection is abandoned. This must be lower
than connect-int and ping-int. The default value is 60 = 6 seconds, the unit 0.1 seconds.
connect-int time
In case it is not possible to connect to the remote DRBD device immediately, DRBD keeps on trying to
connect. With this option you can set the time between two retries. The default value is 10 seconds,
the unit is 1 second.
ping-int time
If the TCP/IP connection linking a DRBD device pair is idle for more than time seconds, DRBD will
generate a keep-alive packet to check if its partner is still alive. The default is 10 seconds, the
unit is 1 second.
ping-timeout time
The time the peer has time to answer to a keep-alive packet. In case the peer's reply is not received
within this time period, it is considered as dead. The default value is 500ms, the default unit are
tenths of a second.
max-buffers number
Limits the memory usage per DRBD minor device on the receiving side, or for internal buffers during
resync or online-verify. Unit is PAGE_SIZE, which is 4 KiB on most systems. The minimum possible
setting is hard coded to 32 (=128 KiB). These buffers are used to hold data blocks while they are
written to/read from disk. To avoid possible distributed deadlocks on congestion, this setting is
used as a throttle threshold rather than a hard limit. Once more than max-buffers pages are in use,
further allocation from this pool is throttled. You want to increase max-buffers if you cannot
saturate the IO backend on the receiving side.
ko-count number
In case the secondary node fails to complete a single write request for count times the timeout, it
is expelled from the cluster. (I.e. the primary node will kill and restart the connection.) To
disable this feature, you should explicitly set it to 0; defaults may change between versions.
max-epoch-size number
The highest number of data blocks between two write barriers. If you set this smaller than 10, you
might decrease your performance.
allow-two-primaries
With this option set you may assign the primary role to both nodes. You only should use this option
if you use a shared storage file system on top of DRBD. At the time of writing the only ones are:
OCFS2 and GFS. If you use this option with any other file system, you are going to crash your nodes
and to corrupt your data!
unplug-watermark number
This setting has no effect with recent kernels that use explicit on-stack plugging (upstream Linux
kernel 2.6.39, distributions may have backported).
When the number of pending write requests on the standby (secondary) node exceeds the
unplug-watermark, we trigger the request processing of our backing storage device. Some storage
controllers deliver better performance with small values, others deliver best performance when the
value is set to the same value as max-buffers, yet others don't feel much effect at all. Minimum 16,
default 128, maximum 131072.
cram-hmac-alg
You need to specify the HMAC algorithm to enable peer authentication at all. You are strongly
encouraged to use peer authentication. The HMAC algorithm will be used for the challenge response
authentication of the peer. You may specify any digest algorithm that is named in /proc/crypto.
shared-secret
The shared secret used in peer authentication. May be up to 64 characters. Note that peer
authentication is disabled as long as no cram-hmac-alg (see above) is specified.
after-sb-0pri policy
possible policies are:
disconnect
No automatic resynchronization, simply disconnect.
discard-younger-primary
Auto sync from the node that was primary before the split-brain situation happened.
discard-older-primary
Auto sync from the node that became primary as second during the split-brain situation.
discard-zero-changes
In case one node did not write anything since the split brain became evident, sync from the node
that wrote something to the node that did not write anything. In case none wrote anything this
policy uses a random decision to perform a "resync" of 0 blocks. In case both have written
something this policy disconnects the nodes.
discard-least-changes
Auto sync from the node that touched more blocks during the split brain situation.
discard-node-NODENAME
Auto sync to the named node.
after-sb-1pri policy
possible policies are:
disconnect
No automatic resynchronization, simply disconnect.
consensus
Discard the version of the secondary if the outcome of the after-sb-0pri algorithm would also
destroy the current secondary's data. Otherwise disconnect.
violently-as0p
Always take the decision of the after-sb-0pri algorithm, even if that causes an erratic change of
the primary's view of the data. This is only useful if you use a one-node FS (i.e. not OCFS2 or
GFS) with the allow-two-primaries flag, AND if you really know what you are doing. This is
DANGEROUS and MAY CRASH YOUR MACHINE if you have an FS mounted on the primary node.
discard-secondary
Discard the secondary's version.
call-pri-lost-after-sb
Always honor the outcome of the after-sb-0pri algorithm. In case it decides the current secondary
has the right data, it calls the "pri-lost-after-sb" handler on the current primary.
after-sb-2pri policy
possible policies are:
disconnect
No automatic resynchronization, simply disconnect.
violently-as0p
Always take the decision of the after-sb-0pri algorithm, even if that causes an erratic change of
the primary's view of the data. This is only useful if you use a one-node FS (i.e. not OCFS2 or
GFS) with the allow-two-primaries flag, AND if you really know what you are doing. This is
DANGEROUS and MAY CRASH YOUR MACHINE if you have an FS mounted on the primary node.
call-pri-lost-after-sb
Call the "pri-lost-after-sb" helper program on one of the machines. This program is expected to
reboot the machine, i.e. make it secondary.
always-asbp
Normally the automatic after-split-brain policies are only used if current states of the UUIDs do not
indicate the presence of a third node.
With this option you request that the automatic after-split-brain policies are used as long as the
data sets of the nodes are somehow related. This might cause a full sync, if the UUIDs indicate the
presence of a third node. (Or double faults led to strange UUID sets.)
rr-conflict policy
This option helps to solve the cases when the outcome of the resync decision is incompatible with the
current role assignment in the cluster.
disconnect
No automatic resynchronization, simply disconnect.
violently
Sync to the primary node is allowed, violating the assumption that data on a block device are
stable for one of the nodes. Dangerous, do not use.
call-pri-lost
Call the pri-lost-after-sb helper program on one of the machines unless that machine can demote
to secondary. The helper program is expected to reboot the machine, which brings the node into a
secondary role. Which machine runs the helper program is determined by the after-sb-0pri
strategy.
data-integrity-alg alg
DRBD can ensure the data integrity of the user's data on the network by comparing hash values.
Normally this is ensured by the 16 bit checksums in the headers of TCP/IP packets.
This option can be set to any of the kernel's data digest algorithms. In a typical kernel
configuration you should have at least one of md5, sha1, and crc32c available. By default this is not
enabled.
See also the notes on data integrity.
tcp-cork
DRBD usually uses the TCP socket option TCP_CORK to hint to the network stack when it can expect more
data, and when it should flush out what it has in its send queue. It turned out that there is at
least one network stack that performs worse when one uses this hinting method. Therefore we
introducted this option. By setting tcp-cork to no you can disable the setting and clearing of the
TCP_CORK socket option by DRBD.
on-congestion congestion_policy,
congestion-fill fill_threshold,
congestion-extents active_extents_threshold
By default DRBD blocks when the available TCP send queue becomes full. That means it will slow down
the application that generates the write requests that cause DRBD to send more data down that TCP
connection.
When DRBD is deployed with DRBD-proxy it might be more desirable that DRBD goes into AHEAD/BEHIND
mode shortly before the send queue becomes full. In AHEAD/BEHIND mode DRBD does no longer replicate
data, but still keeps the connection open.
The advantage of the AHEAD/BEHIND mode is that the application is not slowed down, even if
DRBD-proxy's buffer is not sufficient to buffer all write requests. The downside is that the peer
node falls behind, and that a resync will be necessary to bring it back into sync. During that resync
the peer node will have an inconsistent disk.
Available congestion_policys are block and pull-ahead. The default is block. Fill_threshold might be
in the range of 0 to 10GiBytes. The default is 0 which disables the check. Active_extents_threshold
has the same limits as al-extents.
The AHEAD/BEHIND mode and its settings are available since DRBD 8.3.10.
wfc-timeout time
Wait for connection timeout.
The init script drbd(8) blocks the boot process until the DRBD resources are connected. When the
cluster manager starts later, it does not see a resource with internal split-brain. In case you want
to limit the wait time, do it here. Default is 0, which means unlimited. The unit is seconds.
degr-wfc-timeout time
Wait for connection timeout, if this node was a degraded cluster. In case a degraded cluster (=
cluster with only one node left) is rebooted, this timeout value is used instead of wfc-timeout,
because the peer is less likely to show up in time, if it had been dead before. Value 0 means
unlimited.
outdated-wfc-timeout time
Wait for connection timeout, if the peer was outdated. In case a degraded cluster (= cluster with
only one node left) with an outdated peer disk is rebooted, this timeout value is used instead of
wfc-timeout, because the peer is not allowed to become primary in the meantime. Value 0 means
unlimited.
wait-after-sb
By setting this option you can make the init script to continue to wait even if the device pair had a
split brain situation and therefore refuses to connect.
become-primary-on node-name
Sets on which node the device should be promoted to primary role by the init script. The node-name
might either be a host name or the keyword both. When this option is not set the devices stay in
secondary role on both nodes. Usually one delegates the role assignment to a cluster manager (e.g.
heartbeat).
stacked-timeouts
Usually wfc-timeout and degr-wfc-timeout are ignored for stacked devices, instead twice the amount of
connect-int is used for the connection timeouts. With the stacked-timeouts keyword you disable this,
and force DRBD to mind the wfc-timeout and degr-wfc-timeout statements. Only do that if the peer of
the stacked resource is usually not available or will usually not become primary. By using this
option incorrectly, you run the risk of causing unexpected split brain.
resync-rate rate
To ensure a smooth operation of the application on top of DRBD, it is possible to limit the bandwidth
which may be used by background synchronizations. The default is 250 KB/sec, the default unit is
KB/sec. Optional suffixes K, M, G are allowed.
use-rle
During resync-handshake, the dirty-bitmaps of the nodes are exchanged and merged (using bit-or), so
the nodes will have the same understanding of which blocks are dirty. On large devices, the fine
grained dirty-bitmap can become large as well, and the bitmap exchange can take quite some time on
low-bandwidth links.
Because the bitmap typically contains compact areas where all bits are unset (clean) or set (dirty),
a simple run-length encoding scheme can considerably reduce the network traffic necessary for the
bitmap exchange.
For backward compatibility reasons, and because on fast links this possibly does not improve transfer
time but consumes cpu cycles, this defaults to off.
socket-check-timeout value
In setups involving a DRBD-proxy and connections that experience a lot of buffer-bloat it might be
necessary to set ping-timeout to an unusual high value. By default DRBD uses the same value to wait
if a newly established TCP-connection is stable. Since the DRBD-proxy is usually located in the same
data center such a long wait time may hinder DRBD's connect process.
In such setups socket-check-timeout should be set to at least to the round trip time between DRBD and
DRBD-proxy. I.e. in most cases to 1.
The default unit is tenths of a second, the default value is 0 (which causes DRBD to use the value of
ping-timeout instead). Introduced in 8.4.5.
resync-after res-name
By default, resynchronization of all devices would run in parallel. By defining a resync-after
dependency, the resynchronization of this resource will start only if the resource res-name is
already in connected state (i.e., has finished its resynchronization).
al-extents extents
DRBD automatically performs hot area detection. With this parameter you control how big the hot area
(= active set) can get. Each extent marks 4M of the backing storage (= low-level device). In case a
primary node leaves the cluster unexpectedly, the areas covered by the active set must be resynced
upon rejoining of the failed node. The data structure is stored in the meta-data area, therefore each
change of the active set is a write operation to the meta-data device. A higher number of extents
gives longer resync times but less updates to the meta-data. The default number of extents is 1237.
(Minimum: 7, Maximum: 65534)
Note that the effective maximum may be smaller, depending on how you created the device meta data,
see also drbdmeta(8). The effective maximum is 919 * (available on-disk activity-log ring-buffer
area/4kB -1), the default 32kB ring-buffer effects a maximum of 6433 (covers more than 25 GiB of
data). We recommend to keep this well within the amount your backend storage and replication link are
able to resync inside of about 5 minutes.
al-updates {yes | no}
DRBD's activity log transaction writing makes it possible, that after the crash of a primary node a
partial (bit-map based) resync is sufficient to bring the node back to up-to-date. Setting al-updates
to no might increase normal operation performance but causes DRBD to do a full resync when a crashed
primary gets reconnected. The default value is yes.
verify-alg hash-alg
During online verification (as initiated by the verify sub-command), rather than doing a bit-wise
comparison, DRBD applies a hash function to the contents of every block being verified, and compares
that hash with the peer. This option defines the hash algorithm being used for that purpose. It can
be set to any of the kernel's data digest algorithms. In a typical kernel configuration you should
have at least one of md5, sha1, and crc32c available. By default this is not enabled; you must set
this option explicitly in order to be able to use on-line device verification.
See also the notes on data integrity.
csums-alg hash-alg
A resync process sends all marked data blocks from the source to the destination node, as long as no
csums-alg is given. When one is specified the resync process exchanges hash values of all marked
blocks first, and sends only those data blocks that have different hash values.
This setting is useful for DRBD setups with low bandwidth links. During the restart of a crashed
primary node, all blocks covered by the activity log are marked for resync. But a large part of those
will actually be still in sync, therefore using csums-alg will lower the required bandwidth in
exchange for CPU cycles.
c-plan-ahead plan_time,
c-fill-target fill_target,
c-delay-target delay_target,
c-max-rate max_rate
The dynamic resync speed controller gets enabled with setting plan_time to a positive value. It aims
to fill the buffers along the data path with either a constant amount of data fill_target, or aims to
have a constant delay time of delay_target along the path. The controller has an upper bound of
max_rate.
By plan_time the agility of the controller is configured. Higher values yield for slower/lower
responses of the controller to deviation from the target value. It should be at least 5 times RTT.
For regular data paths a fill_target in the area of 4k to 100k is appropriate. For a setup that
contains drbd-proxy it is advisable to use delay_target instead. Only when fill_target is set to 0
the controller will use delay_target. 5 times RTT is a reasonable starting value. Max_rate should be
set to the bandwidth available between the DRBD-hosts and the machines hosting DRBD-proxy, or to the
available disk-bandwidth.
The default value of plan_time is 0, the default unit is 0.1 seconds. Fill_target has 0 and sectors
as default unit. Delay_target has 1 (100ms) and 0.1 as default unit. Max_rate has 10240 (100MiB/s)
and KiB/s as default unit.
The dynamic resync speed controller and its settings are available since DRBD 8.3.9.
c-min-rate min_rate
A node that is primary and sync-source has to schedule application IO requests and resync IO
requests. The min_rate tells DRBD use only up to min_rate for resync IO and to dedicate all other
available IO bandwidth to application requests.
Note: The value 0 has a special meaning. It disables the limitation of resync IO completely, which
might slow down application IO considerably. Set it to a value of 1, if you prefer that resync IO
never slows down application IO.
Note: Although the name might suggest that it is a lower bound for the dynamic resync speed
controller, it is not. If the DRBD-proxy buffer is full, the dynamic resync speed controller is free
to lower the resync speed down to 0, completely independent of the c-min-rate setting.
The default value of min_rate is 250, in units of KiB/s
on-no-data-accessible ond-policy
This setting controls what happens to IO requests on a degraded, disk less node (I.e. no data store
is reachable). The available policies are io-error and suspend-io.
If ond-policy is set to suspend-io you can either resume IO by attaching/connecting the last lost
data storage, or by the drbdadm resume-io res command. The latter will result in IO errors of course.
The default is io-error. This setting is available since DRBD 8.3.9.
cpu-mask cpu-mask
Sets the cpu-affinity-mask for DRBD's kernel threads of this device. The default value of cpu-mask is
0, which means that DRBD's kernel threads should be spread over all CPUs of the machine. This value
must be given in hexadecimal notation. If it is too big it will be truncated.
pri-on-incon-degr cmd
This handler is called if the node is primary, degraded and if the local copy of the data is
inconsistent.
pri-lost-after-sb cmd
The node is currently primary, but lost the after-split-brain auto recovery procedure. As as
consequence, it should be abandoned.
pri-lost cmd
The node is currently primary, but DRBD's algorithm thinks that it should become sync target. As a
consequence it should give up its primary role.
fence-peer cmd
The handler is part of the fencing mechanism. This handler is called in case the node needs to fence
the peer's disk. It should use other communication paths than DRBD's network link.
local-io-error cmd
DRBD got an IO error from the local IO subsystem.
initial-split-brain cmd
DRBD has connected and detected a split brain situation. This handler can alert someone in all cases
of split brain, not just those that go unresolved.
split-brain cmd
DRBD detected a split brain situation but remains unresolved. Manual recovery is necessary. This
handler should alert someone on duty.
before-resync-target cmd
DRBD calls this handler just before a resync begins on the node that becomes resync target. It might
be used to take a snapshot of the backing block device.
after-resync-target cmd
DRBD calls this handler just after a resync operation finished on the node whose disk just became
consistent after being inconsistent for the duration of the resync. It might be used to remove a
snapshot of the backing device that was created by the before-resync-target handler.
Other Keywords
include file-pattern
Include all files matching the wildcard pattern file-pattern. The include statement is only allowed
on the top level, i.e. it is not allowed inside any section.
NOTES ON DATA INTEGRITY
There are two independent methods in DRBD to ensure the integrity of the mirrored data. The online-verify
mechanism and the data-integrity-alg of the network section.
Both mechanisms might deliver false positives if the user of DRBD modifies the data which gets written to
disk while the transfer goes on. This may happen for swap, or for certain append while global sync, or
truncate/rewrite workloads, and not necessarily poses a problem for the integrity of the data. Usually
when the initiator of the data transfer does this, it already knows that that data block will not be part
of an on disk data structure, or will be resubmitted with correct data soon enough.
The data-integrity-alg causes the receiving side to log an error about "Digest integrity check FAILED: Ns
+x\n", where N is the sector offset, and x is the size of the request in bytes. It will then disconnect,
and reconnect, thus causing a quick resync. If the sending side at the same time detected a modification,
it warns about "Digest mismatch, buffer modified by upper layers during write: Ns +x\n", which shows that
this was a false positive. The sending side may detect these buffer modifications immediately after the
unmodified data has been copied to the tcp buffers, in which case the receiving side won't notice it.
The most recent (2007) example of systematic corruption was an issue with the TCP offloading engine and
the driver of a certain type of GBit NIC. The actual corruption happened on the DMA transfer from core
memory to the card. Since the TCP checksum gets calculated on the card, this type of corruption stays
undetected as long as you do not use either the online verify or the data-integrity-alg.
We suggest to use the data-integrity-alg only during a pre-production phase due to its CPU costs. Further
we suggest to do online verify runs regularly e.g. once a month during a low load period.
VERSION
This document was revised for version 8.4.0 of the DRBD distribution.
AUTHOR
Written by Philipp Reisner <philipp.reisner@linbit.com> and Lars Ellenberg <lars.ellenberg@linbit.com>.
REPORTING BUGS
Report bugs to <drbd-user@lists.linbit.com>.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2001-2008 LINBIT Information Technologies, Philipp Reisner, Lars Ellenberg. This is free
software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
SEE ALSO
drbd(8), drbddisk(8), drbdsetup(8), drbdmeta(8), drbdadm(8), DRBD User's Guide[1], DRBD web site[3]
NOTES
1. DRBD User's Guide
http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/
2. DRBD's online usage counter
http://usage.drbd.org
3. DRBD web site
http://www.drbd.org/
DRBD 8.4.0 6 May 2011 DRBD.CONF(5)