[Gluster-users] cluster.min-free-disk separate for each, brick

[Deyan Chepishev - SuperHosting.BG]

Hello,


Dan Bretherton wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> Dan Bretherton wrote:
>>>
>>> On 15/08/11 20:00, gluster-users-request at gluster.org wrote:
>>>> Message: 1
>>>> Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2011 23:24:46 +0300
>>>> From: "Deyan Chepishev - SuperHosting.BG"<dchepishev at superhosting.bg>
>>>> Subject: [Gluster-users] cluster.min-free-disk  separate for each
>>>>     brick
>>>> To: gluster-users at gluster.org
>>>> Message-ID:<4E482F0E.3030604 at superhosting.bg>
>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I have a gluster set up with very different brick sizes.
>>>>
>>>> brick1: 9T
>>>> brick2: 9T
>>>> brick3: 37T
>>>>
>>>> with this configuration if I set the parameter cluster.min-free-disk to 10% it
>>>> applies to all bricks which is quite uncomfortable with these brick sizes,
>>>> because 10% for the small bricks are ~ 1T but for the big brick it is ~3.7T 
>>>> and
>>>> what happens at the end is that if all brick go to 90% usage and I continue
>>>> writing, the small ones eventually fill up to 100% while the big one has 
>>>> enough
>>>> free space.
>>>>
>>>> My question is, is there a way to set cluster.min-free-disk per brick instead
>>>> setting it for the entire volume or any other way to work around this 
>>>> problem ?
>>>>
>>>> Thank you in advance
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Deyan
>>>>
>>> Hello Deyan,
>>>
>>> I have exactly the same problem and I have asked about it before - see links 
>>> below.
>>>
>>> http://community.gluster.org/q/in-version-3-1-4-how-can-i-set-the-minimum-amount-of-free-disk-space-on-the-bricks/ 
>>>
>>> http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2011-May/007788.html
>>>
>>> My understanding is that the patch referred to in Amar's reply in the May 
>>> thread prevents a "migrate-data" rebalance operation failing by running out 
>>> of space on smaller bricks, but that doesn't solve the problem we are 
>>> having.  Being able to set min-free-disk for each brick separately would be 
>>> useful, as would being able to set this value as a number of bytes rather 
>>> than a percentage.  However, even if these features were present we would 
>>> still have a problem when the amount of free space becomes less than 
>>> min-free-disk, because this just results in a warning message in the logs 
>>> and doesn't actually prevent more files from being written.  In other words, 
>>> min-free-disk is a soft limit rather than a hard limit.  When a volume is 
>>> more than 90% full there may still be hundreds of gigabytes of free space 
>>> spread over the large bricks, but the small bricks may each only have a few 
>>> gigabytes left of even less.  Users do "df" and see lots of free space in 
>>> the volume so they continue writing files.  However, when GlusterFS chooses 
>>> to write a file to a small brick, the write fails with "device full" errors 
>>> if the file grows too large, which is often the case here with files 
>>> typically several gigabytes in size for some applications.
>>>
>>> I would really like to know if there is a way to make min-free-disk a hard 
>>> limit.  Ideally, GlusterFS would chose a brick on which to write a file 
>>> based on how much free space it has left rather than choosing a brick at 
>>> random (or however it is done now).  That would solve the problem of 
>>> non-uniform brick sizes without the need for a hard min-free-disk limit.
>>>
>>> Amar's comment in the May thread about QA testing being done only on volumes 
>>> with uniform brick sizes prompted me to start standardising on a uniform 
>>> brick size for each volume in my cluster.  My impression is that 
>>> implementing the features needed for users with non-uniform brick sizes is 
>>> not a priority for Gluster, and that users are all expected to use uniform 
>>> brick sizes.  I really think this fact should be stated clearly in the 
>>> GlusterFS documentation, in the sections on creating volumes in the 
>>> Administration Guide for example.  That would stop other users from going 
>>> down the path that I did initially, which has given me a real headache 
>>> because I am now having to move tens of terabytes of data off bricks that 
>>> are larger than the new standard size.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> Dan.
>>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> This is really bad news, because I already migrated my data and I just 
>> realized that I am screwed because Gluster just does not care about the brick 
>> sizes.
>> It is impossible to move to uniform brick sizes.
>>
>> Currently we use 2TB  HDDs, but the disks are growing and soon we will 
>> probably use 3TB hdds or whatever other larges sizes appear on the market. So 
>> if we choose to use raid5 and some level of redundancy (for example 6hdds in 
>> raid5, no matter what their size is) this sooner or later will lead us to non 
>> uniform bricks which is a problem and it is not correct to expect that we 
>> always can or want to provide uniform size bricks.
>>
>> With this way of thinking if we currently have 10T from 6x2T in hdd5, at some 
>> point when there is a 10T on a single disk we will have to use no raid just 
>> because gluster can not handle non uniform bricks.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Deyan
>>
>
> I think Amar might have provided the answer in his posting to the thread 
> yesterday, which has just appeared in my autospam folder.
>
> http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2011-August/008579.html
>
>> With size option, you can have a hardbound on min-free-disk
> This means that you can set a hard limit on min-free-disk, and set a value in 
> GB that is bigger than the biggest file that is ever likely to be written.  
> This looks likely to solve our problem and make non-uniform brick sizes a 
> practical proposition.  I wish I had known about this back in May when I 
> embarked on my cluster restructuring exercise; the issue was discussed in this 
> thread in May as well:  
> http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2011-May/007794.html
>
> Once I have moved all the data off the large bricks and standardised on a 
> uniform brick size, it will be relatively easy to stick to this because I use 
> LVM.  I create logical volumes for new bricks when a volume needs extending.  
> The only problem with this approach is what happens when the amount of free 
> space left on a server is less than the size of the brick you want to create.  
> The only option then would be to use new servers, potentially wasting several 
> TB of free space on existing servers.  The standard brick size for most of my 
> volumes is 3TB, which allows me to use a mixture of small servers and large 
> servers in a volume and limits the amount of free space that would be wasted 
> if there wasn't quite enough free space on a server to create another brick.  
> Another consequence of having 3TB bricks is that a single server typically has 
> two more more bricks belonging to a the same volume, although I do my best to 
> distribute the volumes across different servers in order to spread the load.  
> I am not aware of any problems associated with exporting multiple bricks from 
> a single server and it has not caused me any problems so far that I am aware of.
>
> -Dan.

===> Hi,

I just realize that I actually did not realized Amar's answer. Thank you for 
bringing this to my attention. It really look like working solution I will give 
it a try. I tried to lower the percentage of min free disk space which looks 
like working so far, but hardcoding the min free space looks much better.

Thank you once again.

Regards,
Deyan