Chapter 5. Lock Management
Lock management is a common cluster-infrastructure service that provides a mechanism for other cluster infrastructure components to synchronize their access to shared resources. In a Red Hat Enterprise Linux cluster, DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) is the lock manager.
A lock manager is a traffic cop who controls access to resources in the cluster, such as access to a GFS file system. You need it because without a lock manager, there would be no control over access to your shared storage, and the nodes in the cluster would corrupt each other's data.
As implied in its name, DLM is a distributed lock manager and runs in each cluster node; lock management is distributed across all nodes in the cluster. GFS2 and CLVM use locks from the lock manager. GFS2 uses locks from the lock manager to synchronize access to file system metadata (on shared storage). CLVM uses locks from the lock manager to synchronize updates to LVM volumes and volume groups (also on shared storage). In addition,
rgmanager uses DLM to synchronize service states.
5.1. DLM Locking Model
The DLM locking model provides a rich set of locking modes and both synchronous and asynchronous execution. An application acquires a lock on a lock resource. A one-to-many relationship exists between lock resources and locks: a single lock resource can have multiple locks associated with it.
A lock resource can correspond to an actual object, such as a file, a data structure, a database, or an executable routine, but it does not have to correspond to one of these things. The object you associate with a lock resource determines the granularity of the lock. For example, locking an entire database is considered locking at coarse granularity. Locking each item in a database is considered locking at a fine granularity.
The DLM locking model supports:
- Six locking modes that increasingly restrict access to a resource
- The promotion and demotion of locks through conversion
- Synchronous completion of lock requests
- Asynchronous completion
- Global data through lock value blocks
The DLM provides its own mechanisms to support its locking features, such as inter-node communication to manage lock traffic and recovery protocols to re-master locks after a node failure or to migrate locks when a node joins the cluster. However, the DLM does not provide mechanisms to actually manage the cluster itself. Therefore the DLM expects to operate in a cluster in conjunction with another cluster infrastructure environment that provides the following minimum requirements:
- The node is a part of a cluster.
- All nodes agree on cluster membership and has quorum.
- An IP address must communicate with the DLM on a node. Normally the DLM uses TCP/IP for inter-node communications which restricts it to a single IP address per node (though this can be made more redundant using the bonding driver). The DLM can be configured to use SCTP as its inter-node transport which allows multiple IP addresses per node.
The DLM works with any cluster infrastructure environments that provide the minimum requirements listed above. The choice of an open source or closed source environment is up to the user.
