I hope I'm not screwing anyone up by crossposting, but you posted to both lists and people have already commented on both lists.
Incidentally, you're in the right talk this morning at PICC'10 (Jacob's) -- good choice! Those of you in NJ who aren't here -- shame on you! :) On Fri, 7 May 2010, Jonathan B Bayer wrote: > 1. Which is better for performance, NFS or CIFS? Short answer: NFS. > 2. What would be the best filesystem to store all the export > directories on? You're using linux, so ext3 would be fine, though you could look into vxfs too. > 3. Would it matter if the file system data uses a different virtual > interface than the primary interface? It depends on how busy the primary interface is. A private network for file service is usually a good idea, but when you're relatively small, it doesn't matter as much. > 4. How would you mirror the NFS volume to a second system? Mirror to a second independant linux system? You probably need to snapshot it and rsync it or something similar to that approach. Stephen Harris on Lopsanj has an important point, though. If I understand your config, you're looking at using a centos host system to share out its local storage via NFS to its own guests. In that scenario, you'll almost certainly get better performance giving the block storage to the VMs, as Stephen says. Now, you could mitigate that somewhat by playing with loopback interfaces and keeping the network traffic internal instead of going over the wire. The one advantage of NFS in this case, though, is that when you run out of performance and need better file service, you can probably more easily move the data stores via NFS than from the native block storage, though ultimately it's still just copying virtual containers around. If you're not going to be moving those files to other server, you probably want to keep it block (and that's hard to say, since I'm a big fan of NFS for virtualization :) ). -Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
