[Xen-users] Alternatives to cman+clvmd ?

[Christopher Smith <csmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I currently have a few CentOS 5.2 based Xen clusters at different sites. 
 These are built around a group of 3 or more Xen nodes (blades) and 
some sort of shared storage (FC or iSCSI) carved up by LVM and allocated 
to the domUs.
I am "managing" the shared storage (from the dom0 perspective) using 
cman+clvmd, so that changes to the LVs (rename/resize/create/delete/etc) 
are automatically and immediately visible to all the Xen hosts.
However, this combination seems to be horribly unreliable.  Any network 
hiccup more than a lost ping or two results in cman losing contact with 
the rest of the machines, which it frequently does not regain.  For 
example, failing one of the bonded NICs usually takes few seconds for 
everything to 'stabilise' again on the network, but in that time cman 
has lost contact with all the other nodes and often killed itself (or 
bits of itself) in the process.  Further, I have found I often have to 
reboot the machine completely to convince everything to start talking 
nicely again (why this is so, I have no idea, but on more than one 
occasion I've spent an hour stopping/starting cman and manually killing 
processes trying to get it working again, with no luck, then had a 
reboot fix everything instantly).
I am not interested in any fancy failover of domUs, or anything else 
cluster related on the Xen host side - we address HA and redundancy 
requirements within the VMs themselves.  The only reason I have this 
stuff setup at all, is to be able to use clvmd.  Is there any 
alternative out there that will let me keep using clvmd (or achieve 
similar functionality), without having to worry about cman constantly 
falling over ?
Cheers,
CS
--
Christopher Smith

UNIX Team Leader
Nighthawk Radiology Services
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