In case you are visiting the MySQL Users Conference & Expo this year (April 14-17, Santa Clara, California, highly recommended), these are the sessions where you can watch Phil and myself presenting about DRBD:

• All bases covered: A Hands-on Introduction to High-availability MySQL and DRBD (3-hour tutorial)
• Database Integrity Protection with MySQL and DRBD (1-hour presentation)

Monty Taylor is also doing a High Availability talk that will be touching upon DRBD to some extent:

• High Availability Landscape of MySQL …

You know, normally I use this blog for posting thoughts primarily focused on technical aspects of DRBD, Linux, HA solutions, or (normally) a combination of all three. This one is an exception.

These past couple of days I had the pleasure of doing a DRBD/Linux-HA training with 6 Sales and Professional Services MySQLers. And like just about anyone I’ve met from MySQL up to this point, without exception each and every one of them was smart, professional, open-minded, and generally fun to be around. I greatly enjoyed my past two work days. If you reading this post happen to be one of those 6 guys, thank you very much.

And the nice part about the company I work for is that highly productive and fun days at work like these are the norm, rather than the exception.

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Now you may not believe me, but there actually are situations when DRBD is not the right choice for meeting your storage needs. Since I’ve been asked to compile some of these and present them here, let’s take a look.

Don’t use DRBD when…

• All or most of your data is static. Front-end web servers are a prime example for this. Even though they usually serve highly dynamic content these days, your PHP documents and Perl scripts and JSP’s usually don’t change that often. Using DRBD for that type of data isn’t much use. Use DRBD for your backend store instead. On the front end, you’ll do fine with rsync, although it …

I’ve recently received one database admin’s personal list of DRBD’s perceived limitations. While I’m certainly the last person to say that DRBD is limitation-free (hey, it’s software), I’d like to address these specifically — because really, in my humble opinion, most of them aren’t limitations at all.

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MySQL runs a success story about booking.com, Europe’s leading online reservations agency based in the Netherlands. They run on MySQL Enterprise with DRBD.
Kudos to Kris Köhntopp from MySQL for rolling out that solution!