[Gluster-users] Gluster with ZFS

[Karli Sjöberg]

On Thu, 2025-04-17 at 14:44 +0530, gagan tiwari wrote:
> HI Alexander,
>                               Thanks for the update. Initially, I 
> also thought of deploying Ceph but ceph is quite difficult to set-up
> and manage. Moreover, it's also  hardware demanding.

You are of course entitled to your own opinion but I'd like to point
out that ZFS+Gluster carries a lot of considerations and foot-guns of
their own. Saying that Ceph is hardware demanding is also quite
misleading as you can install a Ceph cluster on VM's or RPi's with 2 GB
of RAM but that's hardly the case for any HPC environment so the
argument kind of falls flat.

Personally I'd argue that having two intermingling systems is more
complex than having one (bigger) system to learn and manage. Now, is
Ceph perfect? No. But is it the most consistent and well-documented in
all aspects? Also no :) Is it the safest choice of the two? Definitely
yes!

/K

> I think it's most suitable for a very large set-up  with hundreds of
> clients. 
> 
> What do you think of MooseFS ?  Have you or anyone else tried
> MooseFS. If yes, how was its performance?
> 
> Thanks,
> Gagan
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 1:45 PM Alexander Schreiber
> <als at thangorodrim.ch> wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 09:40:08AM +0530, gagan tiwari wrote:
> > > Hi Guys,
> > >                   We have been  using OpenZFS in our HPC
> > > environment for
> > > quite some time. And OpenZFS was going fine.
> > > 
> > > But we are now running into scalability issues since OpenZFS
> > > can't be
> > > scaled out.
> > 
> > Since ZFS is a local FS, you are essentially limited to how much
> > storage
> > you can stick into one machine, yes.
> > 
> > > So, I am planning to use Gluster on top of OpenZFS.
> > 
> > I don't think that is giving you the kind of long term scalability
> > you might expect.
> > 
> > > So, I wanted to know if anyone has tried it. if yes, how it was
> > > and any
> > > deployment guide for it.
> > 
> > I'm running GlusterFS in a small cluster for backup storage.
> > 
> > > We have an HPC environment . Data security and extremely fast
> > > read
> > > performance is very important for us.
> > > 
> > > So, please advise.
> > 
> > For that use case I would actually recommend Ceph over GlusterFS,
> > since
> > that can be pretty easily scaled out to very large setups, e.g.
> > CERN is
> > using multiple Ceph clusters sized at several PB and their use
> > cases
> > usually include very fast I/O.
> > 
> > Another concern is that Ceph is being quite actively developed
> > whereas
> > GlusterFS development seems to have slowed down to ... not much,
> > these days.
> > 
> > Kind regards,
> >             Alex.
> > ________
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Community Meeting Calendar:
> > 
> > Schedule -
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