[Gluster-users] single or multiple bricks per server

[Larry Bates]

Message: 3
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2011 13:41:31 -0500
From: Greg_Swift at aotx.uscourts.gov
Subject: Re: [Gluster-users] single or multiple bricks per server
To: Chip Gonzales <chipgz at gmail.com>
Cc: gluster-users at gluster.org, gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org
Message-ID:
	
<OFE1A8AA9E.16AD9284-ON862578C0.00666B83-862578C0.0066AA34 at uscmail.uscourts.gov>
	
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gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org wrote on 06/30/2011 03:52:54 PM:

> I have 3 servers with 7 disks each, is it better to use each
> individual disk as brick (several bricks per server). ?Or to have
> them as a raid volume that presents as a single brick per server?
>
> I'm setting them up as a replicated volume across all three servers.

In our environment (several hundred volumes over several servers that had
several bricks) we were told that a lot of our issues stemmed from the
number of bricks per volume.  We are now going to a max of 2 bricks local
to each node, using lvm.  We are using 2 instead of 1 because we are
separating for replica pairings.

-greg

I'm hoping that someone at Gluster will step forward on this one because
this just doesn't sound correct.  I have two servers with 8x2TB drives 
each and each one is configured as a brick.  I have set up replicated 
and distributed so server 0/drive 0 is mirrored to server 1/drive 0 ...
That's 8 bricks per server and I'm having no problems.  That way if a 
drive goes bad, I replace and re-mirror from/to a single drive.  If I 
use in-server RAID, I either lose space to raid parity (RAID5/RAID5) or 
waste a lot of drive space (RAID-10) before I even get to replicate
across the servers.  If I used in-server RAID and lost a RAIDset, I 
would have to replicate the entire 16TB volume which would take too
long and be a performance hog.  I decided to use replicate for 
mirroring and then use distribute to act as striping mechanism to 
eliminate these two issues.  Up for 18 months without any problems, so
I'm pretty happy.

I've also see people post on this mailing list that had hundreds of
bricks in a single volume, so I'm pretty sure that works.  Can someone
clarify that for us?

Larry Bates
vitalEsafe, Inc.