[Linux-cluster] GFS performance.

[Gordan Bobic]

Ryan Golhar wrote:
> This brings up an interesting question for me....We can 6 machines that 
> host a bunch of virtual machines.  I'd like to put the virtual machines 
> on a shared SAN disk.  If one of the physical machines goes down, 
> another one will take over and host a virtual machine.
> 
> Does it make sense to use GFS to manage the SAN then?  IF the 4x 
> slowdown is there, then this may not be the way to go.

I would expect the performance on few large files (VM disk images) to 
suffer much, much less than this. You have quite a few chices for this 
sort of thing (GFS/GFS2, OCFS/OCFS2, VMFS), but generally, performance 
between them is pretty similar. And on VMs you'll be so virtual I/O 
bound that the speed of the underlying storage won't make any difference 
anyway.

Gordan