Thankfully, Rocks v4.3 kernel roll and Lustre v1.6.1 appear to be based on the same kernel version. This saved me from having to get the kernel source, and patch it for Lustre. I've done that before with some success, but I'm happy to be able to avoid doing it again. The following applies to setting up Rocks so that Lustre is installed and ready on compute nodes. I also put Lustre on the frontend node, but that was done manually, simply by installing the rpms, and configuring grub.
DRBD® refers to block devices designed as a building block to form high availability (HA) clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via an assigned network. DRBD can be understood as network based raid-1.
In the illustration above, the two orange boxes represent two servers that form an HA cluster. The boxes contain the usual components of a Linux™ kernel: file system, buffer cache, disk scheduler, disk drivers, TCP/IP stack and network interface card (NIC) driver. The black arrows illustrate the flow of data between these components.
The orange arrows show the flow of data, as DRBD mirrors the data of a high availably service from the active node of the HA cluster to the standby node of the HA cluster.
LinBit's system for mirroring filesystems across the Network, typically a dedicated LAN, written by Philipp Reisner and LarsEllenberg. This is the general replication technology which is most commonly used by members of by the Linux-HA community. By the w
DRBD is a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via (a dedicated) network. You could see it as a network raid-1.