Design of a Cluster Logical Volume Manager

Design of a Cluster Logical Volume Manager

Abstract:

Logical Volume Managers provide a higher level view of disk storage on a computer system than the traditional view of disks and partitions. However the functionality of the existing logical volume managers is restricted to a single machine and they cannot be easily incorporated in a cluster environment. This is because logical volume managers today do not support distributed updates and locking on metadata. I propose a design of a Cluster Logical Volume Manager which incorporates a distributed locking mechanism on metadata to enforce a single node exclusive access to cluster metadata. The design can be incorporated in practically all the logical volume managers available today. As a case study, I have proposed a design for the Cluster Logical Volume Manager, which enhances the Linux Logical Volume Manager to function in a cluster. The design incorporates a cluster lock manager in the architecture, which ensures that the metadata operations are handled very carefully ensuring stability of the cluster data.