[Gluster-devel] gluster, gfs, ocfs2, and lustre (lustre.org)

[Brandon Lamb]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Shaofeng Yang <syang at incando.com> wrote:
> Can anybody share some thoughts about those cluster file systems? We are
> trying to compare the pros and cons for each solution.
>
> Thanks,
> Shaofeng

Tought question as it depends on what you are needing. Myself I have
messed around with 3 of those for the last 2 years, so far I am still
just using an 2 NFS servers, one for mail and one for web for my 14 or
so client machines until I figure out how to use glusterfs.

I tried gfs (redhat) and I dont remember if I even ever got it to
actually run, I was trying it out on fedora distros. It seemed very
over complicated and not very user friendly (just my experience).

OCFS2 seemed very clean and I was able to use with with ISCSI but man
the load on my server was running at 7 and it was on the slow side.
What I was trying to do with it was create a single drive to put my
maildir data onto (millions of small mail files). The way it worked
was you actually mounted the file system like it was a local file
system on all machines that needed it and the cluster part would
handle the locking or whatnot. Cool concept but overkill for what I
needed.

Also I believe both GFS and OCFS2 are these "specialized" file
systems. What happens if it breaks or goes down? How do you access
your data? Well if gfs or ocfs2 is broken you cant. With glusterfs,
you have direct access to your underlying data. So you can have your
big raid mounted on a server and use XFS file system, glusterfs just
sits on top of this so if for some reason you break your glusterfs
setup you *could* revert back to some other form of serving files
(such as NFS). Obviously this totally depends on your situation and
how you are using it.

I have never used lustre, it sounded cool, but over complicated.

Hence the reason that *so far* I am still using NFS. It comes on every
linux installation, its fairly easy to setup by editing what, 4 lines
or so. GlusterFS takes the same simple approach and if you do break
it, you still have access to your data.

The learning curve for glusterfs is much better than the others from
my experience so far. The biggest thing is just learning all of the
different ways you can configure spec files.