[Gluster-users] Moving external storage between bricks

[Jacob Shucart]

James,

Gluster itself aggregates the multiple filesystems, so you don't need to
use LVM.  You can give Gluster as many filesystems as you want and it will
pool them together and present them as one large volume if that is what
you have in mind.  If ext4 is really what you want to use you can
certainly install Fedora and that has ext4 support.  CentOS 6 will also
have support for ext4 when it is released which won't be too far away I
imagine.  Gluster itself does not have a preference between small bricks
and large bricks.  The reasons for using smaller or larger filesystems
underneath Gluster as storage bricks is more to get around issues that
those filesystems might have related to the maximum file sizes or maximum
number of files or that sort of thing.

-Jacob

-----Original Message-----
From: Burnash, James [mailto:jburnash at knight.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 8:30 AM
To: gluster-users at gluster.org
Subject: Moving external storage between bricks

Hello.

So, here's my problem.

I have 4 storage servers that will be configured as replicate +
distribute, each of which has two external storage arrays, each with their
own controller. Those external arrays will be used to store archived large
(10GB) files that will only be read-only after their initial copy to the
glusterfs storage.

Currently, the external arrays are the items of interest. What I'd like to
do is this:

- Create multiple hardware RAID 5 arrays on each storage server, which
would present to the OS as approx 8 16TB physical drives.
- Create an ext3 file system on each of those devices (I'm using CentOS
5.5. so ext4 is still not really an option for me)
- Mount those multiple file systems to the storage server, and then
aggregate them all under gluster to export under a single namespace to NFS
and the Gluster client.

How do I aggregate those multiple file systems without involving LVM in
some way.

I've read that Glusterfs likes "small" bricks, though I haven't really
been able to track down why. Any pointers to good technical info on this
subject would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

James Burnash, Unix Engineering


DISCLAIMER:
This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the
addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or
confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this
e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or
copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this in error, please immediately notify
me and permanently delete the original and any copy of any e-mail and any
printout thereof. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or
error-free. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors
or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of
e-mail transmission.
NOTICE REGARDING PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY Knight Capital Group may, at
its discretion, monitor and review the content of all e-mail
communications. http://www.knight.com