[Gluster-users] How beefy does an arbiter box have to be?

[William Kern]

On 3/29/2016 6:33 PM, Ravishankar N wrote:
> On 03/30/2016 12:12 AM, William Kern wrote:
>> We have a few replica 2 clusters using Gluster 3.4  for various 
>> projects.
>>
>> They have worked very well, but we always had to be careful about 
>> split brain when doing maintenance or in the event of a failure.
>>
>> So now we are looking to do a forklift upgrade to 3.7.x and add 
>> Arbiter box(s) into the new setup (i.e  replica 2 + arbiter)
>>
>> Can we get away with using some older machines from the bone pile 
>> (i.e core2 cpu 2/4GB) or should we be using proper server kit?
>> Would SSDs on the arbiter help or are they even necessary?
>
> Not an authoritative answer but I think it should be manageable. I 
> don't think SSDs for arbiter alone (and not the other 2 bricks of the 
> replica) would improve performance in any way because we don't do 
> read() or write() on the files of the arbiter brick.
>

ok, great, it sounds like RAM  is the most important thing to watch for 
and according to the gluster sizing docs, we should be fine there.

I'm looking forward to having the arbiter there, its a great solution 
for a case like ours where we really don't want or need a true replica 3.

> Another option would be to reserve a brick on the existing  nodes 
> itself when creating a volume. (Sorry, converting an existing replica 
> 2 volume to arbiter is not yet supported but is on the cards.)

Thats fine, this is a cap, build and migrate upgrade, we want a newer OS 
as well.

-wk