[Gluster-users] VM Images Over GlusterFS

[Enrico Valsecchi]

Matthias Teege ha scritto:
>> I am wondering if there is anyone on list that is successfully serving
>> virtual machine images (Xen, KVM, VMWare, etc.) over GlusterFS.  I am
>>     
>
> I using it with Xen and vserver. With Xen and large disk images it
> works. Live migration and failover works. Healing is a major problem. It
> blocks the image for sometime so you have downtime anyway. I have to
> write a heartbeat ressource to manage the healing before restart the
> VM. Linux Vserver works to but there are performance issues im working
> on. It is no problem to "dd" a file to gluster with reasonable speed but
> in "realtime" vserver is much faster on drbd then on gluster. Maybe I hit
> a "lot of small files" Problem here or there is a problem with vservers
> COW mechanism. I use 1.3.12 only.
>   
Hello!

I have tested with success Xen with GlusterFs.
I does not have a cleaned idea if my scenario is same at your.
I have a xen server attached with Infiniband and RDMA access on 2 
GlusterFS servers, used to store xen images files, and configured in AFR 
by Client.
GlusterFS version are 1.3.12, xen tested are 3.2.0, 3.2.1, 3.3.0.
Images file are mounted in xen with tap:aio disk option, because with 
this system have more performance that "file" option and,
in order to more post found in the net, it's more safe.
Only way to use tap:aio on xen are to mount GlusterFS with "-d" option.

Now, where problems you have found?


Enrico