[Linux-cluster] Starter Cluster / GFS

[Nicolas Ross]

> In a 2-node cluster, you can have running GFS with just one node up. But 
> in that case it is advisble to have a quorum block device on the SAN. With 
> a 3 node cluster, you cannot have quorum with just 1 node, and thus you 
> cannot have GFS running. It will block until quorum is re-established.

Ok, I'll keep that in mind and experiment with what it does when I start 
playing with the hardware.

> That depends largely on how big your operations are. I cannot remember 
> what the defaults are, but they are reasonable. In general, big journals 
> can help if you do big I/O operations. In practice, block group sizes can 
> be more important for performance (bigger can help on very large file 
> systems or big files).

The volume will be composed of 7 1TB disk in raid5, so 6 TB. It will host 
many, many small files, and some biger files. But the files that change the 
most often will mos likely be smaller than the blocsize. The gfs will not be 
used for io-intensive tasks, that's where the standalone volumes comes into 
play. It'll be used to access many files, often. Specificly, apache will run 
from it, with document root, session store, etc on the gfs.

Regards,