I wouldn't go so far as to say putting a vm in a file on a networked filesystem 
is wrong.  It is just not the best choice if you have a ceph cluster at hand, 
in my opinion.  Networked filesystems have a bunch of extra stuff to implement 
posix semantics and live in kernel space.  You just need simple block device 
semantics and you don't need to entangle the hypervisor's kernel space.  What 
it boils down to is the engineering first principle of selecting the least 
complicated solution that satisfies the requirements of the problem. You don't 
get anything when you trade the simplicity of rbd for the complexity of a 
networked filesystem.

For format 2 I think the only caveat is that it requires newer clients and the 
kernel client takes some time to catch up to the user space clients.  You may 
not be able to mount filesystems on rbd devices with the kernel client 
depending on kernel version, this may or may not be important to you.  You can 
always use a vm to mount a filesystem on a rbd device as a work around.  

On Oct 16, 2013, at 9:11 AM, Jon <three1...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Michael,
> 
> Thanks for the reply.  It seems like ceph isn't actually "mounting" the rbd 
> to the vm host which is where I think I was getting hung up (I had previously 
> been attempting to mount rbds directly to multiple hosts and as you can 
> imagine having issues).
> 
> Could you possible expound on why using a clustered filesystem approach is 
> wrong (or conversely why using RBD's is the correct approach)?
> 
> As for format2 rbd images, it looks like they provide exactly the 
> Copy-On-Write functionality that I am looking for.  Any caveats or things I 
> should look out for when going from format 1 to format 2 images? (I think I 
> read something about not being able to use both at the same time...)
> 
> Thanks Again,
> Jon A
> 
> 
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Michael Lowe <j.michael.l...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> I live migrate all the time using the rbd driver in qemu, no problems.  Qemu 
> will issue a flush as part of the migration so everything is consistent.  
> It's the right way to use ceph to back vm's. I would strongly recommend 
> against a network file system approach.  You may want to look into format 2 
> rbd images, the cloning and writable snapshots may be what you are looking 
> for.
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> On Oct 14, 2013, at 5:37 AM, Jon <three1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I would like to live migrate a VM between two "hypervisors".  Is it possible 
>> to do this with a rbd disk or should the vm disks be created as qcow images 
>> on a CephFS/NFS share (is it possible to do clvm over rbds? OR GlusterFS 
>> over rbds?)and point kvm at the network directory.  As I understand it, rbds 
>> aren't "cluster aware" so you can't mount an rbd on multiple hosts at once, 
>> but maybe libvirt has a way to handle the transfer...?  I like the idea of 
>> "master" or "golden" images where guests write any changes to a new image, I 
>> don't think rbds are able to handle copy-on-write in the same way kvm does 
>> so maybe a clustered filesystem approach is the ideal way to go.
>> 
>> Thanks for your input. I think I'm just missing some piece. .. I just don't 
>> grok...
>> 
>> Bestv Regards,
>> Jon A
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> ceph-users mailing list
>> ceph-users@lists.ceph.com
>> http://lists.ceph.com/listinfo.cgi/ceph-users-ceph.com
> 

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