[Linux-cluster] a basic question

[Patrick Caulfield]

Mustafa A. Hashmi wrote:
> On 7/4/06, Patrick Caulfield <pcaulfie at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Giovanni Bracco wrote:
>> > I have a cluster of 20 opteron dual core dual processors with spare
>> disk space
>> > on each of the 20 nodes.
>> >
>> > I would like to configure a cluster file system using all the 20
>> available
>> > disk partitions, one on each of the cluster nodes.
>> >
>> > Is GFS suitable?
>> >
>> > In other words, a host can be a server and a client to gfs at the
>> same time?
>> >
>>
>>
>> No. you need shared storage for GFS.
> 
> Won't gnbd exports work here?
> 

They could do. but if you have 20 nodes each with their own storage you'd need
to export every disk to every other server.

Then what do you do? If you aggregate them using LVM you end up with 20 points
of failure for your filesystem !

When cluster mirroring is ready this will help somewhat, but it's nowhere near
the same thing as distributing the load over 20 machines and keeping it reliable.


patrick