So far, it works terribly! Atleast for storing VHDs… Have had tons of issues, performance and stability related. I have been trying unsuccessfully for almost 18 months to find a stable solution. There’s a 6 page thread on the subject on the XenServer forums.
I do not use it for production VMs. I only use it for storing backups, and regular files. Gluster servers and clients can run fine under XenServer though. > On Mar 30, 2016, at 11:37 PM, Pawan Devaiah <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks for your inputs Russell and thing > > Russel: I would be interested in knowing how Gluster is working with Xen? Did > you have any issues? > > Cheers > Dev > > On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 4:23 PM, Russell Purinton <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > If High Availability is important then you really need 3 nodes, even if the > 3rd node is just a 1U server for storing meta data. With only 2 nodes you > will encounter split brain conditions which can not only crash and corrupt > your VMs, but can cause you plenty of downtime as you manually resolve the > split brain condition. I understand you’re starting with 2 nodes, but just > don’t expect high availability, and do keep good backups because split brain > condition means that different data would be written to differently to both > nodes. If you were dealing with say, small pictures, or text documents, this > might be easy to deal with, but that’s much harder to resolve with VHDs. > Usually you would have to revert to a snapshot after a split brain, otherwise > the VM has file system corruption. > > Also, with the 3 node (replica 3 arbiter 1) setup there’s currently a bug > that results in very slow write speeds which may make running many VMs > problematic. > > As far as access from Windows clients, I do not recommend using the Windows > NFS client, as I’ve found it to be problematic if the connection is ever > lost, it can cause windows explorer to hang completely and require a restart > of the VM. Instead, install the Samba server and access the shares over SMB. > For Linux clients, you can use NFS, but you’ll probably have better results > installing the actual Gluster client. > > Gluster has been pretty good for me for storing backups. > > I haven’t worked at all with VMware, as I run a Citrix XenServer pool myself, > so I don’t know what you might run into for issues there. > > Generally speaking I do recommend having a battery backed up RAID controller > with onboard DDR or some NVFlash cache, as this will significantly improve > write speeds than going without it, however I would only recommend using > RAID0. If you use RAID1, 5, 6, 10 etc then you will be losing a significant > amount of space keeping so many copies of the data. > > Hope this helps. > > Russ > > > On Mar 30, 2016, at 10:28 PM, Pawan Devaiah <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Hi All, > > I am planning to build highly available Clustered NAS using GlusterFS, which > will be accessed by windows and linux clients on VMware or Hyper-V hypervisor. > I am looking for a cook book of sorts to achieve this, since this is new > implementation I want to do it right from the begining > > Hardware : 2x 4 U servers with 36 X 4 TB drives (I understand minimum 3 nodes > are required for reliable cluster, but lack of space on the rack means we > have to start with 2 and add additional nodes later > > Workload: Store VMware VM files and store backup data > > Compatibility : VMware Hypervisor > > This is going to be production system, so should I use RAID or EC is ready > for production? > > High Availability is the key > > Any guidance will be much appreciated. > > Cheers > Dev > _______________________________________________ > Gluster-users mailing list > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > http://www.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users > <http://www.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users> > >
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