[Gluster-users] Seeking Feedback on Gluster Development Priorities/Roadmap

[Burnash, James]

Agreed. Everything that has a positive impact on performance and flexibility in configuring, and especially RECONFIGURING volumes would really make Glusterfs a star for flexible storage management.

A specific for instance is this: I was migrating from GlusterFS 3.04 to 3.1.1 running Distributed-Replicate. Additionally, going forward I wanted to split the storage pool into dedicated read-write and read-only namespaces.

In order to do this, I split my storage pool of 6 servers in half, taking away the mirrored server of each pair.

This left me with a single server to configure as read-write, and two servers to configure as read-only (since this was the most heavily used functionality here).

Since I only had one server to setup as read-write, I had to set it up as Distributed, because Replicate required 2 bricks and I initially setup the read-write server with only one.

Now that I had all of the new servers up and running, I was able to take down the old servers (after a service outage to update all of the client machines to the new Native glusterfs client).

However, when I reconfigured the second read-write server, I had to have another production outage to delete the existing Replicate (only) volume and reconfigure it to be Distributed-Replicate. In addition, I had to restart the native Glusterfs client on all servers (all 175 of them) in order for them to be able to utilize the new configuration.

I really do understand the making all of this work without a service interruption is probably hideously complex. That said, if GlusterFS COULD do all of this, it would really stand out in functionality over other distributed filesystems - even more so than it already does.

I must add - though I have spent my fair share of time screaming at my monitor and cursing the day I ever got involved with software of this complexity - the truth is, that pretty much defines my relationship with computers in general :-). It has little to do specifically with GlusterFS, which I truly believe is  Best In Class product. Please keep focused on what it does best (distribute large files for simultaneous access by multiple clients), and don't try to turn it into ZFS or some other general purpose file system.

Thanks!

James Burnash, Unix Engineering

-----Original Message-----
From: gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org [mailto:gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org] On Behalf Of Todd Daugherty
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 2:56 AM
To: Ben Golub
Cc: gluster-users at gluster.org
Subject: Re: [Gluster-users] Seeking Feedback on Gluster Development Priorities/Roadmap

Performance and Disk Pools. Those are number ONE for me.

Todd

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Ben Golub <ben at gluster.com> wrote:
> SEEKING FEEDBACK ON ROADMAP
>
> Gluster is looking for feedback on its roadmap and priorities for 2011.
>
> In Q1, we have placed a heavy emphasis on packaging Gluster as a virtual
> appliance, and have released a Gluster Virtual Storage Appliance for
> VMWare, a Gluster Amazon Machine Image, and a Gluster Rightscale template.
>
> Our next point release will include a set of management and monitoring
> tools.
>
> Following that, our internal priorities are:
>
> -Continuous Data Replication (over WAN)
>
> -Improved User Interface
>
> -CIFS/Active Directory Support
>
> -Object storage  (unified file and object)
>
> -Geo-replication to Amazon S3 (unify public and private cloud)
>
> -Continuous Data Protection
>
> -REST management API's
>
> -Enhanced support for ISCSi SANs
>
> Are these the right priorities? How would you prioritize?
>
> (We will be scheduling an IRC conference later this month).
>
> -Ben Golub (Gluster CEO), Anand Babu (Gluster founder & CTO), and Hitesh
> Chellani (Gluster Founder & VP)
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-users mailing list
> Gluster-users at gluster.org
> http://gluster.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
>
>
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