[Gluster-users] Is the size of bricks limiting the size of files I can store?

[Jim Kinney]

On April 12, 2018 3:48:32 PM EDT, Andreas Davour <ante at Update.UU.SE> wrote:
>On Mon, 2 Apr 2018, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2018-04-02 at 20:07 +0200, Andreas Davour wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2 Apr 2018, Nithya Balachandran wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2 April 2018 at 14:48, Andreas Davour <ante at update.uu.se> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi
>>>>>
>>>>> I've found something that works so weird I'm certain I have
>>>>> missed how
>>>>> gluster is supposed to be used, but I can not figure out how.
>>>>> This is my
>>>>> scenario.
>>>>>
>>>>> I have a volume, created from 16 nodes, each with a brick of the
>>>>> same
>>>>> size. The total of that volume thus is in the Terabyte scale.
>>>>> It's a
>>>>> distributed volume with a replica count of 2.
>>>>>
>>>>> The filesystem when mounted on the clients is not even close to
>>>>> getting
>>>>> full, as displayed by 'df'.
>>>>>
>>>>> But, when one of my users try to copy a file from another network
>>>>> storage
>>>>> to the gluster volume, he gets a 'filesystem full' error. What
>>>>> happened? I
>>>>> looked at the bricks and figured out that one big file had ended
>>>>> up on a
>>>>> brick that was half full or so, and the big file did not fit in
>>>>> the space
>>>>> that was left on that brick.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> This is working as expected. As files are not split up (unless you
>>>> are
>>>> using shards) the size of the file is restricted by the size of the
>>>> individual bricks.
>>>
>>> Thanks a lot for that definitive answer. Is there a way to manage
>>> this?
>>> Can you shard just those files, making them replicated in the
>>> process?
>>
>> I manage this by using thin pool, thin lvm and add new drives to the
>> lvm across all gluster nodes and expand the user space. My thinking
>on
>> this is a RAID 10 with the RAID 0 in the lvm and the RAID1 handled by
>> gluster replica 2+   :-)
>
>I'm not sure I see how that solved the problem, but as you have though 
>it through I think you are trying to say something I should understand.
>
>/andreas

By adding space to a logical volume, effectively below the control of gluster, the entire space is available for users. Gluster manages replication across hosts and lvm provides absolute space allocation on each host.

So I have 3 hosts, replica 3, and 12 bricks on each host, 1 brick for each mount point the clients see. Some bricks are a single drive while others are 2 and 1 is 5 drives. That same lvm setup is replicated on all 3 hosts. Now a client wants more storage. They buy 3 new drives, 1 for each host. Each host gets the lvm command queued up to add the new drive to the volume for that client. Then in parallel, all 3 hosts expand the volume along with a filesystem resize. In about 2 seconds gluster picks up the change in size. Since this size change is at the host filesystem level, a file larger than the remaining space on the original drive can be written as lvm will simply span the physical volumes. Gluster would choke and not span bricks. 


>
>--
>"economics is a pseudoscience; the astrology of our time"
>Kim Stanley Robinson

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