Gluster users - Oct 2013 - GlusterFS as underlying Replicated Disk for App Server

Hi All,

We have a requirement for a common replicated filesystem between our two
datacentres, mostly for DR and patching purposes when running Weblogic
clusters.

For those that are not acquainted, Weblogic has a persistent store that it
uses for global transaction logs amongst other things. This store can be
hosted on shared disk (usually NFS), or in recent versions within an Oracle
DB. Unfortunately, some of the products that we use, have to use the disk
option.

Ordinarily I'd just follow Oracle's guidelines and use an Enterprise NAS
head and NFS, however the NAS head we have at my present role, has rather
lacklustre replication granularity (every 5mins), which just won't cut it,
so we're looking at alternatives, including throwing more cash at the
storage vendor.

The Linux team here use GlusterFS to host and replicate their Puppet
infrastructure between the datacentres. They like and understand it, and
say it's got good performance, so we were wondering if we could also
leverage Gluster for the persistent data stores that can't be DB hosted.

Wondered if anyone has tried this kind of thing with Weblogic or any other
JEE app server before, and if it is feasible. We'll obviously test this
extensively, but before we do spend time and resource, we're just after
some degree of confidence that it may work at all.

Thanks

Dan

--
Dan Hawker
--
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On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Dan Hawker <danhawker at googlemail.com>
wrote:
> The Linux team here use GlusterFS to host and replicate their Puppet
> infrastructure between the datacentres. They like and understand it, and
say
> it's got good performance, so we were wondering if we could also
leverage
> Gluster for the persistent data stores that can't be DB hosted.
>
> Wondered if anyone has tried this kind of thing with Weblogic or any other
> JEE app server before, and if it is feasible. We'll obviously test this
> extensively, but before we do spend time and resource, we're just after
some
> degree of confidence that it may work at all.
I would expect it to work, but as you mention, testing is key.
Since you also mentioned that your team is comfortable with puppet,
you might want to have a look at puppet-gluster [1] to get yourself up
and running with a quick test setup.
Disclaimer: I'm the puppet-gluster author.

HTH,
James

[1] https://github.com/purpleidea/puppet-gluster

What sort of read/write patterns are these global transaction logs?

I've found GlusterFS excels at use cases were you need to read or
write entire files at a time, and in great volume from many sources.
We use it as storage for our production users who read and write a lot
of large media files (mostly from our render farm, which can push a
lot of data around very quickly), and it works brilliantly.

However, we did attempt to run applications off it (as we were running
applications off an NFS share previously), and host our Linux user
home drives from it, and both of these cases didn't quite work out for
us.  GlusterFS appears to not like reading portions of a file at a
time (say, when you load a binary or library, and Linux only requires
a small part of that file read).  We ended up going back to NFS for
home and apps, but keeping GlusterFS where it excelled - for large
volume file writes and reads of entire files.

-Dan


On 8 October 2013 00:27, Dan Hawker <danhawker at googlemail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> We have a requirement for a common replicated filesystem between our two
> datacentres, mostly for DR and patching purposes when running Weblogic
> clusters.
>
> For those that are not acquainted, Weblogic has a persistent store that it
> uses for global transaction logs amongst other things. This store can be
> hosted on shared disk (usually NFS), or in recent versions within an Oracle
> DB. Unfortunately, some of the products that we use, have to use the disk
> option.
>
> Ordinarily I'd just follow Oracle's guidelines and use an
Enterprise NAS
> head and NFS, however the NAS head we have at my present role, has rather
> lacklustre replication granularity (every 5mins), which just won't cut
it,
> so we're looking at alternatives, including throwing more cash at the
> storage vendor.
>
> The Linux team here use GlusterFS to host and replicate their Puppet
> infrastructure between the datacentres. They like and understand it, and
say
> it's got good performance, so we were wondering if we could also
leverage
> Gluster for the persistent data stores that can't be DB hosted.
>
> Wondered if anyone has tried this kind of thing with Weblogic or any other
> JEE app server before, and if it is feasible. We'll obviously test this
> extensively, but before we do spend time and resource, we're just after
some
> degree of confidence that it may work at all.
>
> Thanks
>
> Dan
>
> --
> Dan Hawker
> --
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-users mailing list
> Gluster-users at gluster.org
> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users


-- 
Dan Mons
R&D SysAdmin
Cutting Edge
http://cuttingedge.com.au