[Gluster-users] GlusterFS 3.3 not yet quiet ready for Virtual Machines storage

[Brian Candler]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 10:28:50PM +0000, Fernando Frediani (Qube) wrote:
>    I have been reading and trying to test(without much success) Gluster
>    3.3 for Virtual Machines storage and from what I could see it isn’t yet
>    quiet ready for running virtual machines.
> 
>    One great improvement about the granular locking which was essential
>    for these types of environments was achieved, but the other one is
>    still not, which is the ability to use
>    striped+(distributed)+replicated.

I think you would have to have a very specialised requirement for this to be
"essential".

Suppose you have a host with 12 disks in a RAID10, and you make a replicated
volume with another similar host for resilience.  That gives you a pretty
huge I/O ops for a VM to use, and also a pretty huge VM size (depending on
how big the disks are, of course).

Also: if you are handling terabytes of data, the natural approach in many
cases would be to have a relatively small VM image, and store the data in
glusterfs, mounting it from within the VM.  This means that the same dataset
can be shared by multiple VMs, and is easier to backup and replicate.