[Gluster-users] Recommended underlining disk storage environment

Keith Freedman
Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:40:19 -0000

I'm not sure there's an official recommendation.
I use XFS with much success.

I think the choice of underlying filesystem depends highly on the
types of data you'll be storing and how you'll be storing the info.
If it's primarily read data, then a filesystem with journaling
capabilities may not provide much benefit.  If you'll have lots of
files in few directories then a filesystem with better large
directory metrix would be ideal, etc...  Gluster depends on the
underlying filesystem, and will work no matter what that filesystem
is provided it supports extended attributes.

I've found XFS works great for most purposes.  If you're on Solaris,
I'd recommend ZFS.  but It seems people are fond of ReiserFS, but you
could certainly use EXT3 with extended attributes enabled and be just
fine most likely.

as for LVM.  again, this really depends what you want to do with the data.
If you need to use multiple physical devices/partitions to present
just one to gluster you can do that and use LVM to manage your
resizing of the single logical volume.
Alternatively, you could use gluster's Unify translator to present
one effective large/consolidated volume which can be made up of
multiple devices/partitions.

In this scenario, you could potentially have multiple underlying
configurations. You could Unify xfs, reiser, and ext3 filesystems
into one gluster filesystem.

as for RAID, again, the faster and more appropriately configured the
underlying system for your data requirements, the better off you will
be.  If you're going to use gluster's AFR translator, then I'd not
bother with hardware raid/mirroring and just use RAID0 stripes,
however, if you have the money, and can afford to do RAID0+1, that's
always a huge benefit on read performance.  Of course, if you're in a
high write environment, then there's no real added value so it's not
worth doing.

this doesn't realy answer your question, but hopefully it helps.


At 01:30 AM 12/3/2008, Stas Oskin wrote:
>Hi.
>
>What is the recommended underlining disk storage environment for GlusterFS?
>
>* file-system - EXT3, XFS...
>* technology - RAID0 (strip) or LVM 1/2
>
>Regards.
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