[Gluster-users] I'm new to Gluster, and have some questions

[Steve Wilson]

On 10/21/2010 08:55 PM, Horacio Sanson wrote:
>
> This is also something I would like to know. When connecting clients I use the
> command
>
>     mount -t [nfs|glusterfs]<ip-address>:<volume-name>  /mount/point
>
> where ip-address is the IP of any of the servers that have the volume
> configured. It is not clear to me how the reliability part works here. If I
> disconnect the server with that ip-address I loose access to the files. True
> that the files are still accessible via other servers but I need to manually
> set the mount to point to another server which is not exactly high-
> availability.
>
>    

I believe this is true for NFS mounts but not necessarily so for the 
Gluster FUSE mounts. The mount.glusterfs man page shows two methods for 
mounting:

mount -t glusterfs [-o <options>] <volumeserver>:<volumeid> <mount‐point>
mount -t glusterfs [-o <options>] <path/to/volumefile> <mountpoint>

The second approach relies on local access to the volume file. We plan 
to distribute our volume files to each client and then have them mount 
Gluster volumes based on these volume files.

For occasional access to data on a Gluster volume an NFS mount will 
suffice. But most of our Gluster usage will require constant and 
high-availability access to data on the Gluster volumes. So, we'll 
definitely be going the Gluster FUSE route with distributed volume files.

Steve