Lustre discuss - Feb 2009 - compact lustre system advice needed

Hi,

Is it possible to set up a lustre service on a single machine with multiple
ethernet ports, multiple cpu cores and multiple disks?

The idea would be that the machine would either use L4 link aggregation or
mulitple IP''s and a modest number of clients (<10)
would access the file system.  The MDT and >=1 OST''s would not share
physical disks.  The motivation for this is to get the best
performance possible for such a small collection of hosts.  In my case,
there would be 1 writer and multiple (asynchronous) readers.

The clients would be seperate machines. The MGS/MDS/OSS''s would be
"in" the
same machine.

Has this been done or discussed before?

any comments welcome,
thanks,
Stuart
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Yes, it can be done (use bonded Ethernet), but with only a single  
server NFS is likely a better fit - Lustre''s advantage is scaling with
many servers.

Kevin


On Feb 26, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Stuart Marshall <stuart.l.marshall at gmail.com 
 > wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to set up a lustre service on a single machine with  
> multiple ethernet ports, multiple cpu cores and multiple disks?
>
> The idea would be that the machine would either use L4 link  
> aggregation or mulitple IP''s and a modest number of clients
(<10)
> would access the file system.  The MDT and >=1 OST''s would not
share
> physical disks.  The motivation for this is to get the best
> performance possible for such a small collection of hosts.  In my  
> case, there would be 1 writer and multiple (asynchronous) readers.
>
> The clients would be seperate machines. The MGS/MDS/OSS''s would be
> "in" the same machine.
>
> Has this been done or discussed before?
>
> any comments welcome,
> thanks,
> Stuart
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lustre-discuss mailing list
> Lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss

Thanks for the reply

I''m interested in the sense that I thought the lustre
client<->server i/o
has less overhead and latency than NFS.  If that is true, then this may be
better than NFS even with one server.

In particular, with single patchless lustre client using ethernet, I get can
much better performance from my existing (larger) lustre system than from
NFS.  Since each file
is actually only on one server, it seems the same might be true in the case
I described.

So I''m game to test this if I can figure out the details of the
configuration.  I''m quite familiar with the regular configuration with
distinct MDS/MGS and OSS''s.

Stuart
>
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Kevin Van Maren <Kevin.Vanmaren at
sun.com>wrote:
>
>> Yes, it can be done (use bonded Ethernet), but with only a single
server
>> NFS is likely a better fit - Lustre''s advantage is scaling
with many
>> servers.
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>>
>>
>> On Feb 26, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Stuart Marshall <stuart.l.marshall at
gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Hi,
>>>
>>> Is it possible to set up a lustre service on a single machine with
>>> multiple ethernet ports, multiple cpu cores and multiple disks?
>>>
>>> The idea would be that the machine would either use L4 link
aggregation
>>> or mulitple IP''s and a modest number of clients (<10)
>>> would access the file system.  The MDT and >=1 OST''s
would not share
>>> physical disks.  The motivation for this is to get the best
>>> performance possible for such a small collection of hosts.  In my
case,
>>> there would be 1 writer and multiple (asynchronous) readers.
>>>
>>> The clients would be seperate machines. The MGS/MDS/OSS''s
would be "in"
>>> the same machine.
>>>
>>> Has this been done or discussed before?
>>>
>>> any comments welcome,
>>> thanks,
>>> Stuart
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Lustre-discuss mailing list
>>> Lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
>>> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
>>>
>>
>
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