[Gluster-users] Cookbook for Clustered NAS

[Pawan Devaiah]

Thanks for your inputs Russell and thing

Russel: I would be interested in knowing how Gluster is working with Xen?
Did you have any issues?

Cheers
Dev

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 4:23 PM, Russell Purinton <
russell.purinton at gmail.com> wrote:

> If High Availability is important then you really need 3 nodes, even if
> the 3rd node is just a 1U server for storing meta data. With only 2 nodes
> you will encounter split brain conditions which can not only crash and
> corrupt your VMs, but can cause you plenty of downtime as you manually
> resolve the split brain condition. I understand you’re starting with 2
> nodes, but just don’t expect high availability, and do keep good backups
> because split brain condition means that different data would be written to
> differently to both nodes. If you were dealing with say, small pictures, or
> text documents, this might be easy to deal with, but that’s much harder to
> resolve with VHDs. Usually you would have to revert to a snapshot after a
> split brain, otherwise the VM has file system corruption.
>
> Also, with the 3 node (replica 3 arbiter 1) setup there’s currently a bug
> that results in very slow write speeds which may make running many VMs
> problematic.
>
> As far as access from Windows clients, I do not recommend using the
> Windows NFS client, as I’ve found it to be problematic if the connection is
> ever lost, it can cause windows explorer to hang completely and require a
> restart of the VM. Instead, install the Samba server and access the shares
> over SMB. For Linux clients, you can use NFS, but you’ll probably have
> better results installing the actual Gluster client.
>
> Gluster has been pretty good for me for storing backups.
>
> I haven’t worked at all with VMware, as I run a Citrix XenServer pool
> myself, so I don’t know what you might run into for issues there.
>
> Generally speaking I do recommend having a battery backed up RAID
> controller with onboard DDR or some NVFlash cache, as this will
> significantly improve write speeds than going without it, however I would
> only recommend using RAID0. If you use RAID1, 5, 6, 10 etc then you will be
> losing a significant amount of space keeping so many copies of the data.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Russ
>
>
> On Mar 30, 2016, at 10:28 PM, Pawan Devaiah <pawan.devaiah at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am planning to build highly available Clustered NAS using GlusterFS,
> which will be accessed by windows and linux clients on VMware or Hyper-V
> hypervisor.
> I am looking for a cook book of sorts to achieve this, since this is new
> implementation I want to do it right from the begining
>
> Hardware : 2x 4 U servers with 36 X 4 TB drives (I understand minimum 3
> nodes are required for reliable cluster, but lack of space on the rack
> means we have to start with 2 and add additional nodes later
>
> Workload: Store VMware VM files and store backup data
>
> Compatibility : VMware Hypervisor
>
> This is going to be production system, so should I use RAID or EC is ready
> for production?
>
> High Availability is the key
>
> Any guidance will be much appreciated.
>
> Cheers
> Dev
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