More fun OES2 tricks

I had an idea while I was googling around a bit ago. This may not work the way I expect as I'm not 100% on the technologies involved. But it sounds feasible.

Lets say you want to create a cluster mirror of a 2-node cluster for disaster recovery purposes. This will need at least four servers to set up. You have shared storage for both cluster pairs. So far so good.

Create the four servers as OES2-Linux servers. Set up the shared storage as needed so everything can see what it should in each site. Use DRBD to create new block-devices that'll be mirrored between the cluster pairs. Then set up NetWare-in-VM on each server, using the DRBD block-devices as the Cluster disk devices. You could even do SYS: on the DRBD block-devices if you want a true cluster-clone. That way when disk I/O happens on the clustered resources it gets replicated asynchronously to the DR site; unlike software RAID1 the I/O is considered committed when it hits local storage, SW RAID1 only considers writes committed when all mirrored LUNs report the commit.

Then, if the primary site ever dies, you can bring up an exact replica of the primary cluster, only on the secondary cluster pair. Key details like how to get the same network in both locations I leave as an exercise for the Cisco engineers. But still, an interesting idea.