Cluster file systems

Question

OCFS/GFS/other, what do you prefer for Linux and why?
Are there any solutions for Windows servers? Especially interested to share the same partition between Linux & Windows.

Personally I am have an experience only with OCFS2 and find it stable only on SLES10.

Anything new when it comes to this question? Have things changed in the last two years at all? — Jed Daniels, Sep 13 '11 at 06:08

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 03 '09 at 23:26

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Seriously consider Sun's open-source CFS Lustre

answered Jun 03 '09 at 23:26

Chopper3

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 04 '09 at 00:32

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GFS2 was until 5.3 a "technology preview", even though the documentation for RHCS gave specific instructions for it. I can't speak to it in 5.3 because I gave up on it.

I have heard good things about Lustre and OCFS. I have also gathered from listening to a lot of people that (if you have the disk space available) DRBD is an excellent way to go. Unfortunately, I'm yet to try it.

answered Jun 04 '09 at 00:32

Matt Simmons

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OCFS is really good :-) – Antoine Benkemoun Jun 04 '09 at 05:02
DRBD is good at what it does but it's for mirroring disk volumes between machines for failover/redundancy/local read performance reasons, not aggregating networked disks into one big pool of storage. – David Hicks Jun 04 '09 at 12:12

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

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I discussed some of the merits and drawbacks ... well, ok, the drawbacks, of ocfs2 in a production environment over in another question.

Long story short: Cool toys, but make sure you reallyreallyreallyREALLY need the featureset before you deploy it, or you might deploy yourself into a corner. You'll watch your permissible downtime dribble away through your fingers as lights blink and disks spin incomprehensibly.

k.i.s.s - keep IT simple, stupid. Note the caps.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:14

Community

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answered Jun 04 '09 at 06:19

Karl Katzke

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We had a similar experience with OCFS2 on SLES10, except in our case we had to spend a week down to one machine running from backup while I "almost" got OCFS2 up and running again. Now we run NFS + heartbeat and all is well – Mark Porter Jun 04 '09 at 19:35

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 04 '09 at 08:27

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Take a look at chirp http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/chirp/ . It is pretty straightforward to setup and should run both on Linux and Windows

answered Jun 04 '09 at 08:27

hartem

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 04 '09 at 00:41

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We use GFS on RHEL 5.3 and CentOS 5.3 with no issues. From what I see, Windows support is in its infancy though.

answered Jun 04 '09 at 00:41

Josh

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score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 04 '09 at 04:08

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You may want to check out GlusterFS. It's Linux-only, but very configurable. One of the advantages is the lack of needing extra metadata servers if you're starting out small.

answered Jun 04 '09 at 04:08

David

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score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Jun 04 '09 at 12:10

Are there any solutions for Windows servers?

NBD Server for Windows might be the answer:

http://www.vanheusden.com/windows/nbdsrvr/

It allows you to share disk blocks from Windows machines to a Linux server. You can aggregate those blocks into a RAID array of some kind (use Linux software RAID, MDADM) using NBD on your Linux server:

http://nbd.sourceforge.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdadm

I'm inclined to think that machines providing shared network block devices are going to want second network cards.

Especially interested to share the same partition between Linux & Windows.

You can format your new volume and share it as a Samba share.

smbfs/cifs has a lot of problems. especially with a random writes inside a large files. — disserman, Jun 04 '09 at 16:25

Cluster file systems

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