Gluster users - Dec 2010 - how to optimize performance on server side

Hi,

What is the best practice in configuring the storage bricks. 

I have 4 nodes with each 4 disks. I want to have the best performance so
I will make a stripe of these 4 servers. But how can I get the best
performance out of each server? 

1 - Make a software stripe (with md raid0) over all the internal disks
and export this as 1 volume, and then
volume create performance-volume stripe 4 node1:/bigdisk node2:/bigdisk
node3:/bigdisk node4:/bigdisk

2 - Let gluster do the striping - make each disk a volume and let
glusterfs do the striping:
volume create performance-volume stripe 16 node1:/disk1 node1:/disk2 ...
node4:/disk3 node4:/disk4

Any best practices?

Peter Gotwalt

Hi,

On 22.12.2010, at 19:21, Gotwalt, P. wrote:
> I have 4 nodes with each 4 disks. I want to have the best performance so
> I will make a stripe of these 4 servers. But how can I get the best
> performance out of each server? 
> 
> 1 - Make a software stripe (with md raid0) over all the internal disks
> and export this as 1 volume, and then
> volume create performance-volume stripe 4 node1:/bigdisk node2:/bigdisk
> node3:/bigdisk node4:/bigdisk
> 
Raid0? Seriously? - You know that 0 Data can be rescued if one of those disks
crashes?

We have 12disk RAID6 Storage servers with software RAID. 3 Gbit ports and
performance is great.

Adding each single disk via gluster is mainly a lot of typing work. Thus we
decided to do the Software raid layer and use its management capabilities, then
add glusterfs atop of that.

I guess it depends on you workloads. Depending on the network links between you
storage nodes and you client nodes, you might not need to tune a lot for speed.
(If you have one single Gbit link and your lan is Gbit then Gbit is your
bottleneck and not the raid-pattern....
Here again raid0 would give you no performance gain at all.

--udo.

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