TOPIC:

I have been looking for an answer here on the forum and did not find any. I apologize if this has already been answered.

I'm still a bit of a DRBD noobie and have not used HA-Lizard as I inherited my current server setup. I have two XenServers with identical hardware which are using the local storage for DRBD. I am considering HA-Lizard since I have been using DRBD in the past. I just rebuilt my XenServers and updated to 6.5. One issue I had in the past was that XenServer updates (at least the one I tried) broke DRBD. How are XenServer updates handled using HA-Lizard? Thanks in advance for any responses.

Patch updates do not affect any of our SW packages or DRBD - however, major version updates as in 6.2 -> 6.5 will remove them.

In XenServer 6.5+, DRBD is actually part of the kernel, so you would not lose the DRBD driver. You would lose the DRBD command line tools (ie. drbdadm) which can be easily reinstalled as an RPM.

Regarding HA-Lizard, it can be backed up and reinstalled quite easily.

With all that said, you can perform an upgrade with no downtime as long as you plan accordingly and reinstall the componenents to each host after it has completed its upgrade.