[CentOS] GFS/GFS2 on CentOS

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 05:12:24PM -0400, Boris Epstein wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org> wrote:
> > 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
> > _______________________________________________
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> > CentOS at centos.org
> > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> >
> 
> Thanks Ray!
> 
> Is it feasible to export GFS to NFS clients?

Yup, this is exactly what we do (export GFS2 to NFS clients).

> 
> And one more interesting thing. Wikipedia (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_File_System ) says that GFS2 is
> supported only starting at kernel 2.6.19 but on my CentOS 5.5 uname
> says:
> 
> 
> [bepstein at dellnikon ~]$ uname -a
> Linux dellnikon 2.6.18-194.el5 #1 SMP Fri Apr 2 14:58:35 EDT 2010 i686
> i686 i386 GNU/Linux
> [bepstein at dellnikon ~]$
> 
> Could thins be a problem?

Nope, Red Hat backports the necessary bits from the newer kernels into
their 2.6.18 "stable" release, so you should be all set.

Ray