[CentOS] GFS/GFS2 on CentOS

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:48:17AM -0400, Boris Epstein wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> If you have had experience hosting GFS/GFS2 on CentOS machines could
> you share you general impression on it? Was it realiable? Fast? Any
> issues or concerns?

I've only run GFS2 on RHEL5.  It's been quite reliable, but certainly
has a bit of a learning curve from regular filesystems.

It's fast enough, but if you have more than one node, keep in mind
you'll potentially be held back by lock manager contention under
certain workloads (like reading information on every inode on the
system for backup purposes, etc).

For our uses (home directory server), it's more than adequate.

> 
> Also, how feasible is it to start it on just one machine and then grow
> it out if necessary?

Haven't yet done this, but it can run on top of LVM just fine (clvm in
fact).

> Thanks.
> 
> Boris.

Ray