In the previous blog entry, I walked through the steps on how to set up a VM with the necessary packages to enable Oracle VM template configuration. The template configuration scripts are add-ons one can install inside a VM running in an Oracle VM 3 environment.

dlmfs is a really cool nifty feature as part of OCFS2. Basically, it's a virtual filesystem that allows a user/program to use the DLM through simple filesystem commands/manipulation. Without having to write programs that link with cluster libraries or do complex things, you can literally write a few lines of Python, Java or C code that let you create locks across a number of servers. We use this feature in Oracle VM to coordinate the master server and the locking of VMs across multiple nodes in a cluster. It allows us to make sure that a VM cannot start on multiple servers at once.

A cool, but often missed feature in Oracle Linux is the inclusion of OCFS2. OCFS2 is a native Linux clusterfilesystem which was written many years ago at Oracle (hence the name Oracle Cluster Filesystem) and which got included in the mainline Linux kernel around 2.6.16 somewhere back in 2005. The filesystem is widely used and has a number of really cool features.

A little known feature that we make good use of in Oracle VM is called dm nfs. Basically the ability to create a device mapper device directly on an nfs-based file/filesystem. We use this in Oracle VM 3 if your shared storage for the cluster is nfs based.

Oracle VM clustering relies on the OCFS2 clusterstack/filesystem that is native in the kernel (uek2/2.6.39-x). When we create an HA-enabled pool, we create, what we call, a pool filesystem. That filesystem contains an ocfs2 volume so that we can store cluster-wide data.