Gluster users - Sep 2008 - Technical questions

Hi all,

I'm doing some tests with glusterfs and have some difficulties to 
understand the relation between afr and unify translators in a 
server-side configuration. What I am trying to do is a HA cluster with 
high performance. I've seen that this kind of configuration is well 
supported in client-side mode but my focus is server-side mode.

I have the following architecture : a cluster with 4 nodes configured to 
do server-side AFR. I'm not using the UNIFY translator. There is a 
dedicated network for replication. This is working pretty well. In order 
to test this setup, a client machine access nodes randomly by a round 
robin DNS address.

This model is inspired by examples I've seen on the official wiki. On 
those examples, the AFR volume on each node is "under" a UNIFY volume.
When I start glusterfsd, a message appeared, saying : "WARNING: You have 
defined only one "subvolumes" for unify volume. It may not be the 
desired config, review your volume spec file. If this is how you are 
testing it, you may hit some performance penalty".

This message confirms what I'm thinking : it seems that the unify volume 
is useless in this kind of configuration. Is there a (good) reason in 
defining a unify volume ?

I'm thinking about something else. In AFR mode, do we have to wait that 
a write operation had been replicated on each node before it returns?

On a client point of view :
1. I modify a file on the client (I made a blocking write syscall)
2. The modification is made on node1 (due to rr dns)
3. The modification is replicated on other nodes by node1
4. My write syscall returns with no error

An asynchronous way would be to put step 3. after step 4. (this is what 
I think... maybe it's a very bad thing).

Thank in advance,
Antoine Nguyen.

Antoine Nguyen wrote:
> I have the following architecture : a cluster with 4 nodes configured to 
> do server-side AFR. I'm not using the UNIFY translator. There is a 
> dedicated network for replication. This is working pretty well. In order 
> to test this setup, a client machine access nodes randomly by a round 
> robin DNS address.
> 
> This model is inspired by examples I've seen on the official wiki. On 
> those examples, the AFR volume on each node is "under" a UNIFY
volume.
> When I start glusterfsd, a message appeared, saying : "WARNING: You
have
> defined only one "subvolumes" for unify volume. It may not be the
> desired config, review your volume spec file. If this is how you are 
> testing it, you may hit some performance penalty".
> 
> This message confirms what I'm thinking : it seems that the unify
volume
> is useless in this kind of configuration. Is there a (good) reason in 
> defining a unify volume ?
In this _particular_ scenario there is no obvious reason to be using the 
Unify translator.  In fact, when i set up my first Gluster config in 
this fashion, i too used the Unify translator erroneously - it caused 
nothing but problems until i got rid of it. :P


-- 
Daniel Maher <dma+gluster AT witbe DOT net>