On Jun 01, 2006 08:25 -0400, David Vasil wrote:> pandy.song wrote:
> > One of my storage node has two disk driver, Must I
> > create two ost for two driver using LMC tool ? OR how
> > can I attach two harddisks fro one ost?
>
> You could use LVM to create a single OST out of the two disks. Is there
> a particular reason you dont want to create two separate OSTs? While
> LVM does have the ability to stripe across multiple disks using the -i
> and -I flag to lvcreate, one would expect you to get better performance
> by letting Lustre do the striping.
This is probably true regarding the performance, though we haven''t
tested
in this area specifically. As for the underlying storage, Lustre can
use any block device that is available, and LVM is a good choice. It is
also desirable to have some form of redundancy at the storage layer like
RAID1 or RAID5 unless the filesystem is only used for temporary files and
the loss of files is not serious. There is currently a noticable performance
impact of using the kernel software RAID5 currently that we are working to fix.
One drawback of having many small OSTs vs. fewer larger ones is that the
free space is more fragmented. If you run mostly with smaller files this
is fine, they will be distributed around the OSTs, but if you have very
large files then you will prematurely run out of space.
For all but the smallest systems we recommend OSTs of at least 500GB,
but preferrably close to 2TB in size. With modern disks this may end
up being a single 500GB or 750GB disk, which is also OK, assuming they
have RAID of some form.
Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.