[Gluster-users] Gluster and multi-homed hosts?

[Whit Blauvelt]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:52:18AM -0700, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
> > Hmm, why? An nfs client will do just what you want in terms of assigning a
> > single address for the connection.
> 
> In my experience, Linux NFS is slow, especially for writes.

In my uses, speed isn't critical. So I haven't focused on it.

Linux NFS may be faster now than in your experience, since the kernel has
seen a slew of NFS patches in the last few versions. But I haven't seen
benchmarks to show whether they improve speed, or just reliability.

> > The Gluster client, by contrast,
> > downloads the specification of the storage cluster on initially establishing
> > the connection, and works from that.
> 
> Does that configuration use host names, or IP addresses?  (Yes, what I
> am considering is a kludge...)

Generally hostnames, which you can set in local /etc/hosts files and which
can be different on the servers and the clients. But I believe the Gluster
client, if addressing two hosts, has some communication with each of them.
When reading or writing a file to one, it still touches the other. So having
two hostnames in /etc/hosts pointing at a single IP, for instance, quite
likely would screw things up. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.)

Whit