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From: | Matt Paine |
Subject: | Re: [Gluster-devel] gluster questions |
Date: | Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:31:12 +1000 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax) |
Hi Jon
I'm thinking about implementing gluster as a possible way of home directory server redundancy(using the afr translator), but I have a few questions that I can't seem to find the answer to:-Does installing gluster require a total format of the "bricks" or data volumes involved? Can I just install it over the current system and keep data intact? From what I read it just works over the current filesystem (ext3, xfs, etc)?
No. A gluster "brick" is simply a directory that is exported as a filesystem (very similar to NFS). The underlying filesystem can be whatever you want (as long as its readable from the kernel).
-We currently have a single node w/fibre channel raid (partitioned into 7 luns for different user groups) for our home directories. All exported using NFS. We are getting in a new server and raid unit, which will become the primary server once it is setup. Can I setup the new server and raid as a single gluster node, get the data copied over (via rsync or something similar), move clients over to the new machine, then resetup the old server/raid combo and add it into the gluster system? Or is there a better way to do this?
Sounds like a perfectly fine way to do it.
-Concerning NFS and tied into the above question: we use it for it's compatibility with Mac, Linux and Solaris workstations and has worked fairly well. We'd like to stick with it. Would that require running a fuse/gluster client on one of the above nodes and re-exporting it as NFS? That is the way I seem to understand from my searches on the mailing lists. Or can you directly export a gluster brick via nfs? And if running the fuse/gluster client on one of the server nodes w/ exported NFS is necessary, is this a safe way to do things?
There were problems a while ago about exporting glusterfs volumes as NFS exports, but I believe these problems have now been sorted out (if you use the gluster patched fuse client). I am unable to tell you if Mac and Solaris works with glusterfs exports, but all I can sugest there is to download the source and give it a crack :) Or someone else might be able to jump in with a better answer.
Good luck :) Matt.
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