[Gluster-users] New cluster - first experience

[Gandalf Corvotempesta]

Ok, i'm built my first test cluster with 3.8

Here some questions:

1) Can I use the same cluster for both, maildir hosting and VM images hosting?

2) a simple kernel extract (with replica 3) is
sloooooooooooooooooooow. Direct extract in a brick took 12 seconds.
Extract through gluster (replica 3) took 10m2.214s. In a perfect
world, it should be 3 times the direct extraction (due to the replica)
plus a little bit overhead for the network. Can I optimize this ?

3) I'm thinking creating a volume for Maildir, with no sharding, and 1
volume for VM hosting in the future (with sharding enabled). Is this
OK?

4) I would like to get replica 3 for all, but also the ability to add
1 brick/server per time and not in multiple (in our case, 3 server
every time), like Ceph does. Is this a supported configuration?

5) currently i'm testing gluster on a gigabit network (not bonded,
it's just a test). When running in production, i'll move to 10GbE but
currently I would like to get the best performance from the gigabit
network.

some hardware info: currently 2x E5-2603, 16GB RAM on each storage node.