Hi. Many thanks for your responses. Generally, the qualities of Lustre appear great for a Storage Repository for virtual machine images in XenServer since you would get a combination of fault tolerance, a pretty much infinitely scalable distributed storage pool, speed and ability to migrate virtual machines across a number or hosts. XenServer can use NFS, iSCSI, NetApp, EqualLogic or Fibre Channel storage repositories at this point. It appears there is some capability to create a plugin to allow for others. It is possible that the only way to get Lustre to work would be with the development of a plugin. At this point, to create a minimal Lustre install to play with, how many machines will be required?
Regards, David On 3-Aug-09, at 8:01 PM, Klaus Steden wrote: > > Hi David, > > I did some experiments last year with Lustre 1.6.x and a Dell iSCSI > enclosure. It was a little slow (proof of concept mainly) due to > sharing MDT > and OST traffic on a single GigE strand, but as long as the > operating system > presents a valid block device, Lustre works fine. > > hth > Klaus > > On 7/31/09 11:13 AM, "Cliff White" <[email protected]> etched on > stone > tablets: > >> David Pratt wrote: >>> Hi. I am exploring possibilities for pooled storage for virtual >>> machines. Lustre looks quite interesting for both tolerance and >>> speed. I >>> have a couple of basic questions: >>> >>> 1) Can Lustre present an iSCSI target >> >> Lustre doesn't present target, we use targets, and we should work >> fine >> with iSCSI. We don't have a lot of iSCSI users, due to performance >> concerns. >> >>> 2) I am looking at physical machines with 4 1TB 24x7 drives in >>> each. How >>> many machines will I need to cluster to create a solution with >>> provide a >>> good level of speed and fault tolerance. >>> >> 'It depends' - what is a 'good level of speed' for your app? >> >> Lustre IO scales as you add servers. Basically, if the IO is big >> enough, >> the client 'sees' the bandwidth of multiple servers. So, if you know >> the bandwidth of 1 server (sgp_dd or other raw IO tools helps) then >> your total bandwidth is going to be that figure, times the number of >> servers. This assumes whatever network you have is capable of sinking >> this bandwidth. >> >> So, if you know the IO you need, and you know the IO one server can >> drive, you just divide the one by the other. >> >> Fault tolerance at the disk level == RAID. >> Fault tolerance at the server level is done with shared storage >> failover, using linux-ha or other packages. >> hope this helps, >> cliffw >> >>> Many thanks. >>> >>> Regards, >>> David >>> >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Lustre-discuss mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Lustre-discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss > _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
