I have a mission to implement a two-node active-passive PostgreSQL cluster. The databases at the cluster are rather large (hundreds of GB's) which opts me to consider a shared disk environment. I know this is not natively supported with PostgreSQL, but I have been investigating the Red Hat Cluster Suite with GFS. The idea would be that the cluster programs with gfs (and HP ilo) would make sure that only one postmaster at a time would be able to access the shared disk, and in case the active node fails the cluster software would shift the services to the previously passive node. What I'm pondering here is that is the cluster able to keep the postmasters synchronized at all times so that the database won't get corrupted.
Is there anyone on the list that has seen such configuration, or, even better, implemented it themselves? I found a small document by Devrim Gunduz describing this scenario but it was rather scant on details.
If shared disk is definitely out of the question, the fallback plan would be to use drbd and linux-ha.
