[Gluster-users] Replica bricks fungible?

[Andreas Schwibbe]

Confirmed for gluster 7.9 in distributed-replicate and pure replicate
volume.

One of my 3 nodes died :(
I removed all bricks from dead node and added to new node.
I then started to add an arbiter volume as the distributed-replicate is
configured for 2 replica 1 arbiter.
I made sure to use the exact mount point and path and double / triple
checked the bricks had the same file content in any given dir exactly
as the running bricks it was about to be paired again. Then I used
replace-brick command to replace dead-node:brick0 with new-node:brick0.
Did this one by one for all bricks...

It took a while to get the replacement-node up and running, so the
cluster was still operational and in use. When finally moved all bricks
self-heal-daemon started heal on several files.
All worked out perfectly and with no downtime.

Finally I detached the dead node.
Done.

A.

Am Mittwoch, dem 09.06.2021 um 15:17 +0200 schrieb Diego Zuccato:
> Il 05/06/2021 14:36, Zenon Panoussis ha scritto:
>
> > > What I'm really asking is: can I physically move a brick
> > > from one server to another such as
> > I can now answer my own question: yes, replica bricks are
> > identical and can be physically moved or copied from one
> > server to another. I have now done it a few times without
> > any problems, though I made sure no healing was pending
> > before the moves.
> Well, if it's officially supported, that could be a really interesting
> option to quickly scale big storage systems.
> I'm thinking about our scenario: 3 servers, 36 12TB disks each. When
> adding a new server (or another pair of servers, to keep an odd number)
> it will require quite a lot of time to rebalance, with heavy
> implications both on IB network and latency for the users. If we could
> simply swap around some disks it could be a lot faster.
> Have you documented the procedure you followed?
>