[Linux-cluster] getting started with GFS

[Steven Whitehouse]

Hi,

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 08:40 -0700, Jonathan Horne wrote:
> greetings,
> 
> i am new to clustering, and am just getting my feet wet.  i have a
> couple of scnerios i am chasing down, so im hoping some replied i
> might get here will give me some insights.
> 
> the bulk of my clustering needs are simply just shared SAN storage.  i
> have several that are running ocfs2 with a shared LUN.  we finally
> promoted one of these to production, and the production load over ran
> the read/write limit of the RAID5 pretty quickly.  prod-support team
> is crying foul from the ocfs2, but me personally i think its the RAID5
> LUN that was chosen, that perhaps it should have been RAID10.  but
> ocfs2 is neither here nor there for this post.
> 
> what i would like to know about, is GFS.  i set one up as just a
> shared storage between 2 hosts.  i didnt have to do anything special
> (no .conf files) which just feels wrong.  but they can see and
> read/write from the same storage, and they seem to be working.  if i
> want *just* shared storage (no other clustering features that i would
> use luci to provide), what other considerations do i need to be aware
> of?  i want to explore GFS as an alternate to ocfs2 just to make sure
> im properly covering all the best available options.
> 
> thanks!
> Jonathan
> 
> 
You should have set up a cluster.conf file as gfs2 requires fencing and
dlm to be working in order to function correctly. We always recommend
mounting gfs2 with noatime in order to get the best performance. Also
you need to be aware (for both gfs2 and ocfs2) that the access pattern
of the application will, to a large extent, determine the level of
performance which you see,

Steve.