[Gluster-users] Expanding legacy gluster volumes

[James]

Hi there,

This is a hypothetical problem, not one that describes specific hardware
at the moment.

As we all know, gluster currently usually works best when each brick is
the same size, and each host has the same number of bricks. Let's call
this a "homogeneous" configuration.

Suppose you buy the hardware to build such a pool. Two years go by, and
you want to grow the pool. Changes in drive size, hardware, cpu, etc
will be such that it won't be possible (or sensible) to buy the same
exact hardware, sized drives, etc... A heterogeneous pool is
unavoidable.

Is there a general case solution for this problem? Is something planned
to deal with this problem? I can only think of a few specific corner
case solutions.

Another problem that comes to mind is ensuring that the older slower
servers don't act as bottlenecks to the whole pool. jdarcy had mentioned
that gluster might gain some notion of tiering, to support things like
ssd's in one part of the volume, and slow drives at the other end. Maybe
this sort of architecture can be used to solve the same problems.

Thoughts and discussion welcome.

Cheers,
James

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