[Gluster-users] GlusterFS on ZFS

[Cody Hill]

Hey folks.

I’m looking to deploy GlusterFS to host some VMs. I’ve done a lot of reading and would like to implement Deduplication and Compression in this setup. My thought would be to run ZFS to handle the Compression and Deduplication.

ZFS would give me the following benefits:
1. If a single disk fails rebuilds happen locally instead of over the network
2. Zil & L2Arc should add a slight performance increase
3. Deduplication and Compression are inline and have pretty good performance with modern hardware (Intel Skylake)
4. Automated Snapshotting

I can then layer GlusterFS on top to handle distribution to allow 3x Replicas of my storage.
My question is… Why aren’t more people doing this? Is this a horrible idea for some reason that I’m missing? I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Additional thoughts:
I’d like to use Ganesha pNFS to connect to this storage. (Any issues here?)
I think I’d need KeepAliveD across these 3x nodes to store in the FSTAB (Is this correct?)
I’m also thinking about creating a “Gluster Tier” of 512GB of Intel Optane DIMM to really smooth out write latencies… Any issues here?

Thank you,
Cody Hill