Chris, I'll start by referencing some additional reading from others discussions on this topic:
http://markmail.org/message/d3wg7ll7xzio76qc http://markmail.org/message/fqj3wmg55qb44ssh Pretty much anything involving Mike Tutkowski is centered around the topic of individual LUNs per VM since it's one of the very cool and unique features of SolidFire (per-volume QoS). Edison has been re-working much of the underlying storage architecture within CS to allow for this type of configuration. Next regarding Gluster as primary storage, in my experience with it this hasn't ever turned out very good. Performance usually suffers and KVM and CloudStack don't seem to do too well with it but my experience is a little over 6 months old at this point and I'm sure things have changed since then so I'd welcome anybody else to chime in. Personally I think you might be better served to look at what Wido is doing with Ceph/RBD and CS as it seems a more promising scale-out system, but that's just my personal opinion based on what I have observed from others and not from my own testing. Finally, as for what others are doing. For us, we are using iSCSI but we share a LUN with multiple customers. So a given LUN might have many smaller volumes on it belonging to a diverse number of accounts. This is due to some technical limitations (256 LUNs per VM host), as well as the logistical ones of managing the LUN sprawl which can get messy. In that vein NFS is a very popular alternative. For various reasons (most of them unfounded in my opinion) there seems to be a bias against NFS saying that performance suffers. NFS performs extremely well under most circumstances and is much easier to manage since it's just files on a filesystem. I spend quite a bit of time in IRC and I can say from my time in there that NFS is generally the most popular choice, and primarily for this reason. -Clayton -----Original Message----- From: Chris Mutchler [mailto:ch...@leibnizcreations.com] Sent: Monday, February 25, 2013 10:12 AM To: cloudstack-users@incubator.apache.org Subject: iSCSI mounts and primary storage I am in the designing phase of creating a private cloud using CloudStack. The current portion I am focusing my efforts on is the primary storage design. I could use an iSCSI SAN as the primary storage, but if I do so is it possible for CloudStack to create/use individual LUN for each VM as opposed to a single LUN for the cluster? The other primary storage solution I am looking at is using GlusterFS. It appears to be another good solution for creating a private cloud with expandability and high-availability functionality in mind. What have other users decided for their primary storage devices and what suggestions do you have for someone designing a private cloud solution? Thank you in advance for you time. -- Chris Mutchler ch...@leibnizcreations.com
