[CentOS] who uses Lustre in production with virtual machines?

[Emmanuel Noobadmin]

On 8/4/10, JohnS <jses27 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would this be it?
> http://www.mail-archive.com/lustre-discuss@lists.lustre.org/msg06952.html

Yes, that is my thread :)

> This is something like Virtual Storage like Covalent and IBM have.  Very
> costly to implement the right way and interesting also.

That's what I end up concluding as well based on the replies.
Effectively, I would need to double up each storage node with a
failover node if I really want to guard against machine failure.

It seems a lot cheaper to use gluster where the failover machine can
also be an active node. So with a criss-cross arrangement suggested by
one of the gluster experts, I could get machine redundancy with only
half the physical servers. e.g. S1, S2, S3 with 2 RAID 1 block devices
each. S1-A stores data1 and S1-B replicates S2-A, then S2-A stores
data2 and S2-B replicates S3-A etc.

Not as fully redundant as 1 for 1 failover but I could achieve that by
replicating on another cheap server with N+1 RAID 5 for every N
machine.

So gluster seems a lot more flexible and cost effective to me,
especially without the need for a dedicated metadata server.

Last but most importantly, it seems easier to recover from since it
works on top of the underlying fs, So I figured I can always pull
drives from a dead machine and read the files directly off the disk if
really necessary.

Only concern now is the usual split-brain issue and whether linuxZFS
is matured enough to be used in conjunction as the underlying fs on
Centos5.