From: John Newbigin [mailto:jnewbigin@ict.swin.edu.au]

Bowie Bailey wrote:

...

I am considering building a pair of storage servers that will be using CentOS and GFS to share the storage from a Coraid (SATA+Raid) EtherDrive shelf. Has anyone else tried such a setup?

Is GFS stable enough to use in a production environment?

There is a build of GFS 6.1 at http://rpm.karan.org/el4/csgfs/. Has

anyone

...

used this? Is it stable?

...

Will I run into any problems if I use CentOS 3.5 with it's GFS package

to

...

access a shared 5TB filesystem?

I've been googling on this stuff off and on for a month now. I've found

a

...

bunch of conflicting and confusing information, but no clear answers.

I've

...

been kind of hoping that the new GFS 6.1 packages would be released

while I

...

was waiting... :)

If you are using CentOS 3.5 then you want the el3 version of GFS from here: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-3/3/csgfs/

Right. The version I referenced would be for CentOS 4.1.

This is only GFS 6.0 but it works well. It looks like there are lots of differences in 6.1 so I don't think it will work out of the box on CentOS-3.

I use GFS with GNBD and it works OK. Some of the nodes are 2 hops away over the ethernet and they can sometimes be a bit slow. They also lock up if the network goes down (no hardware fencing).

What is GNBD?

The servers are in the same rack and work well together.

I don't know the maximum filesystem size, or if your hardware is supported but read the docs and it won't cost you anything to try it.

Actually, I'm trying to determine workability before I spend money on the storage hardware, so it will cost me quite a bit to try it.

Does anyone know the maximum filesystem size for CentOS 3.5 and GFS 6.0?

Bowie