[Gluster-users] Recommended underlining disk storage environment

[Keith Freedman]

I'm not sure there's an official recommendation.
I use XFS with much success.

I think the choice of underlying filesystem depends highly on the 
types of data you'll be storing and how you'll be storing the info.
If it's primarily read data, then a filesystem with journaling 
capabilities may not provide much benefit.  If you'll have lots of 
files in few directories then a filesystem with better large 
directory metrix would be ideal, etc...  Gluster depends on the 
underlying filesystem, and will work no matter what that filesystem 
is provided it supports extended attributes.

I've found XFS works great for most purposes.  If you're on Solaris, 
I'd recommend ZFS.  but It seems people are fond of ReiserFS, but you 
could certainly use EXT3 with extended attributes enabled and be just 
fine most likely.

as for LVM.  again, this really depends what you want to do with the data.
If you need to use multiple physical devices/partitions to present 
just one to gluster you can do that and use LVM to manage your 
resizing of the single logical volume.
Alternatively, you could use gluster's Unify translator to present 
one effective large/consolidated volume which can be made up of 
multiple devices/partitions.

In this scenario, you could potentially have multiple underlying 
configurations. You could Unify xfs, reiser, and ext3 filesystems 
into one gluster filesystem.

as for RAID, again, the faster and more appropriately configured the 
underlying system for your data requirements, the better off you will 
be.  If you're going to use gluster's AFR translator, then I'd not 
bother with hardware raid/mirroring and just use RAID0 stripes, 
however, if you have the money, and can afford to do RAID0+1, that's 
always a huge benefit on read performance.  Of course, if you're in a 
high write environment, then there's no real added value so it's not 
worth doing.

this doesn't realy answer your question, but hopefully it helps.


At 01:30 AM 12/3/2008, Stas Oskin wrote:
>Hi.
>
>What is the recommended underlining disk storage environment for GlusterFS?
>
>* file-system - EXT3, XFS...
>* technology - RAID0 (strip) or LVM 1/2
>
>Regards.
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