Gluster users - Jul 2016 - New cluster - first experience

Ok, i'm built my first test cluster with 3.8

Here some questions:

1) Can I use the same cluster for both, maildir hosting and VM images hosting?

2) a simple kernel extract (with replica 3) is
sloooooooooooooooooooow. Direct extract in a brick took 12 seconds.
Extract through gluster (replica 3) took 10m2.214s. In a perfect
world, it should be 3 times the direct extraction (due to the replica)
plus a little bit overhead for the network. Can I optimize this ?

3) I'm thinking creating a volume for Maildir, with no sharding, and 1
volume for VM hosting in the future (with sharding enabled). Is this
OK?

4) I would like to get replica 3 for all, but also the ability to add
1 brick/server per time and not in multiple (in our case, 3 server
every time), like Ceph does. Is this a supported configuration?

5) currently i'm testing gluster on a gigabit network (not bonded,
it's just a test). When running in production, i'll move to 10GbE but
currently I would like to get the best performance from the gigabit
network.

some hardware info: currently 2x E5-2603, 16GB RAM on each storage node.

On 7/07/2016 8:30 PM, Gandalf Corvotempesta wrote:
> 1) Can I use the same cluster for both, maildir hosting and VM images
hosting?
Yes. However maildir involves many tens of thousands of small & large 
files, I *think* that glusters performances isn't the best with very 
large numbers of files in a dir, but hopefully someone else with more 
experience can chime in on that.
>
> 2) a simple kernel extract (with replica 3) is
> sloooooooooooooooooooow. Direct extract in a brick took 12 seconds.
> Extract through gluster (replica 3) took 10m2.214s. In a perfect
> world, it should be 3 times the direct extraction (due to the replica)
> plus a little bit overhead for the network. Can I optimize this ?
That does sound slow - how big was the tar file? what is your network 
speed and setup?
>
> 3) I'm thinking creating a volume for Maildir, with no sharding, and 1
> volume for VM hosting in the future (with sharding enabled). Is this
> OK?
Yes, sounds like a good idea.
>
> 4) I would like to get replica 3 for all, but also the ability to add
> 1 brick/server per time and not in multiple (in our case, 3 server
> every time), like Ceph does. Is this a supported configuration?
Not sure. Disperse Replicated vol maybe?
>
> 5) currently i'm testing gluster on a gigabit network (not bonded,
> it's just a test). When running in production, i'll move to 10GbE
but
> currently I would like to get the best performance from the gigabit
> network.
If you're not using a dual or better bonded connection on replica 3 then 
your write speeds will be limited to 1Gb/3 max.
>
> some hardware info: currently 2x E5-2603, 16GB RAM on each storage node.
Are your clients on the storage nodes or are they dedicated?


-- 
Lindsay Mathieson