Il 2020-02-17 03:59 Markus Kern ha scritto:
Greetings!
I am currently evaluating our options to replace our old mixture of
IBM SAN storage boxes. This will be a strategic decision for the next
years.
One of the solutions I am reviewing is a GlusterFS installation.
Planned usage:
- Central NFS server for around 25 systems providing around 400 docker
containers
- Central storage for a small VMWare vCenter cluster and a RedHat
virtualization cluster. In total maybe around 15 machines
The following requirements ensue from this:
- Fast storage
- High availability
After reading all kind of tutorials and documentation, I came to the
conclusion that for the expected traffic a "Distributed Replicate
Volume" is the proper setup.
Nothing has been purchased but I think about following small setup for
the beginning (call it PoC):
4 x server, each with 8 x 1.8TB 10k SAS disks in a RAID60
Two 10 GBit interfaces per server: One for communication betweens the
4 systems only (separate VLAN), the other one for regular traffic
between clients and servers.
Does this all make sense?
Generally speaking: Is such a setup capable of providing fast enough
storage for a virtualization cluster?
Do you have any hints?
Thanks
Markus
I evaluated such a setup, but I decided against it when using a small
number of nodes/brick.
The key reason was bad sync performance even when using ramdisks *and*
two local bricks (ie: minimal network overhead). You can read more here:
https://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2020-January/037601.html
The interesting thing is that when increasing the number of bricks,
performance scaled well. So it seems gluster *can* be good at
virtualization, but it need a large number of bricks (eg: an entire
server rack or one-brick-for-physical-disk approach). This matches the
experiences shared by other sysadmin.
Moreover, in order to have efficient resync/healing after a node reboot,
you need to enable sharding (ie: the virtual disks will be divided in
many small chunks). I was somewhat unconfortable doing that, as any
problem with gluster incapable to mount the share would lead to quite
trickly "file reconstruction puzzle".
So I ended with local storage (and a hot-standby server) rather than
Gluster. If anyone has some different stories to share, I really am all
ears.
Regards.
--
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