Gluster users - Aug 2018 - thin arbiter vs standard arbiter

I see mentions of thin arbiter in the 4.x notes and I am intrigued.

As I understand it, the thin arbiter volume is

a) receives its data on an async basis (thus it can be on a slower 
link). Thus gluster isn't waiting around to verify if it actually got 
the data.

b) is only consulted in situations where Gluster needs that third vote, 
otherwise it is not consulted.

c) Performance should therefore be better because Gluster is only 
seriously talking to 2 nodes instead of 3 nodes (as in normal arbiter or 
rep 3)

Am I correct?

If so, is thin arbiter ready for production or at least use on 
non-critical workloads?

How safe is it for VMs images (and/or VMs with sharding)?

How much faster is thin arbiter setup over a normal arbiter given that 
the normal data only really sees the metadata?

In a degraded situation (i.e. loss of one real node), would having a 
thin arbiter on a slow link be problematic until everything is healed 
and returned to normal?

Sincerely,

-wk

This recently added document talks about some of the technicalities of the
feature:

https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Administrator%20Guide/Thin-Arbiter-Volumes/

Please go through and see if it answers your questions.

-Amar


On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 11:09 PM, wkmail <wkmail at bneit.com> wrote:
> I see mentions of thin arbiter in the 4.x notes and I am intrigued.
>
> As I understand it, the thin arbiter volume is
>
> a) receives its data on an async basis (thus it can be on a slower link).
> Thus gluster isn't waiting around to verify if it actually got the
data.
>
> b) is only consulted in situations where Gluster needs that third vote,
> otherwise it is not consulted.
>
> c) Performance should therefore be better because Gluster is only
> seriously talking to 2 nodes instead of 3 nodes (as in normal arbiter or
> rep 3)
>
> Am I correct?
>
> If so, is thin arbiter ready for production or at least use on
> non-critical workloads?
>
> How safe is it for VMs images (and/or VMs with sharding)?
>
> How much faster is thin arbiter setup over a normal arbiter given that the
> normal data only really sees the metadata?
>
> In a degraded situation (i.e. loss of one real node), would having a thin
> arbiter on a slow link be problematic until everything is healed and
> returned to normal?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> -wk
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-users mailing list
> Gluster-users at gluster.org
> https://lists.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
>
>
>

-- 
Amar Tumballi (amarts)
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