[Gluster-devel] GlusterFS 3.3 not yet quiet ready for Virtual Machines storage

[Fernando Frediani (Qube)]

Hi,

 

I have been reading and trying to test(without much success) Gluster 3.3 for Virtual Machines storage and from what I could see it isn’t yet quiet ready for running virtual machines.

 

One great improvement about the granular locking which was essential for these types of environments was achieved, but the other one is still not, which is the ability to use striped+(distributed)+replicated.

As it stands now the natural choice would be Distributed + Replicated but when storing a Virtual Machines image it would reside in a single brick(replicated of course), so the maximum amount of IOPS for write would be  the equivalent of a single brick’s RAID controller and its disks underneath, while if striped+(distributed)+replicated was available it would spread the IOPS across all bricks containing the large Virtual Machine image and therefore multiple bricks and RAID controllers.

Also, if I understand correctly, the maximum size for a file wouldn’t be the size of a bricks as ,again, the file would be spread across multiple bricks.

 

This type of volume is said to be available on version 3.3 but as the documentation says it is only to run MapReduce workloads.

 

What is everybody’s opinion about this  and has this been thought or considered ?

 

Regards,

Fernando