Table of Contents
After you have installed DRBD, you must set aside a roughly identically sized storage area on both cluster nodes. This will become the lower-level device for your DRBD resource. You may use any type of block device found on your system for this purpose. Typical examples include:
You may also use resource stacking, meaning you can use one DRBD device as a lower-level device for another. Some specific considerations apply to stacked resources; their configuration is covered in detail in Section 6.18, “Creating a three-node setup”.
![]() | Note |
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While it is possible to use loop devices as lower-level devices for DRBD, doing so is not recommended due to deadlock issues. |
It is not necessary for this storage area to be empty before you create a DRBD resource from it. In fact it is a common use case to create a two-node cluster from a previously non-redundant single-server system using DRBD (some caveats apply — please refer to Section 17.1, “DRBD meta data” if you are planning to do this).
For the purposes of this guide, we assume a very simple setup:
/dev/sda7
.