[Linux-cluster] Starter Cluster / GFS

[Nicolas Ross]

Hi all !

Some of you might know, Apple just discontinued the xServe servers. In the
next few weeks we were about to buy 50 k$ worth of xServes to replace our
aging g5 and xserve-raid setup.

Our setup is primarly composed of about a dozen xServes and a couple
xserve-raid enclosures for storage. All linked-up with fiber channel. On top
of this we have xSan to have a shared filesystem accross all servers. Some
of the volumes are mounted on a single server on a per-needed basis.

Now, I'm not that sure I will go again with xSan / xServes. So I am seeking
alternatives to our xSan setup.

In our server room we have several servers running centos, I am quite
familiar with it. I also grown and learn with Redhat from version 5 or so 
(RedHat 5 decades ago, not RHEL 5). A user on the CentOS mailing list 
pointed me to Gfs from RedHat and to this list.

So today I dug up on Gfs2 on Redhat's site and it petty much fits my need. 
It seems to be a very powerfull solution. If I understand correctly, I need 
to setup a cluster of nodes to use Gfs. Fine with that. But since it's not a 
real "cluster", do I stil need the quorum to operate the global file system 
? On our setup, a particular service runs on a single node from the shared 
filesystem.

The documentation on redhat's site is very technichal, but lacks some 
beginer's hints. For instance, there's a part about the required number of 
journal to create and the size of those. But I cannot find suggested size or 
any thumb-rule for those...

So thanks for any hints.

Regards,
Nicolas Ross