
Cool User File Systems: GlusterFS - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7833
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brutimus
I've been using Gluster in a production environment for over a year now with
an absolutely perfect track record. I use it for the "centralized" filesystem
for a virtualization cluster (using KVM). Currently, I have three virt hosts
setup with dual NICs each to get 2Gbps throughput, sharing a RAID1-style
filesystem (with priorities to the local copy for r/w speed).

I was (and still am) fairly skeptical about using Gluster in this role for a
production environment having come from a fiber/SAN shop before. However, I
gained a lot of faith in Gluster after a non-incident a few months back. One
of our core switches fell offline (the one all three virt hosts were plugged
into) and remained offline for about an hour I believe. When the switch was
brought back online, Gluster managed to put everything back together and
continue operation without any human intervention. All 20 or so VMs were still
humming along like nothing had ever happened. fsck confirmed this.

Even in the case of a failure (which I've not experienced), your data is still
sitting on disk (at least that's how it is with RAID1, I don't know how it's
RAID0 setup works) -- you'll always have access to the raw files Gluster uses.

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abyssknight
Glad to hear its being used successfully. I'm betting things improved greatly
in the last couple of years. Thanks for sharing this. :)

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brutimus
It definitely has. Two years ago, I even had issues with some features of
KVM/QEMU (live migration, for instance), let alone trying to run that on a
distributed FS. It's amazing how fast these techs are coming along.

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abyssknight
No. Just no. Untested, unproven, and unstable. I've made comments about this
before, but the short of it is: don't trust your production file system to
something only researchers use.

When the developers of the product can't get it to work on your servers, and
you've lost a good 3-4 days of uptime, you'll rethink not buying that SAN.

