Hi guys,
We want to use our Ceph cluster to create a shared disk file system to host VM's. Our preference would be to use CephFS but since it is not considered stable I'm looking into alternatives.
The most appealing alternative seems to be to create a RBD volume, format it with a cluster file system and mount it on all the VM host machines.
Obvious file system candidates would be OCFS2 and GFS2 but I'm having trouble finding recent and reliable documentation on the performance, features and reliability of these file systems, especially related to our specific use case. The specifics I'm trying to keep in mind are:
- Using it to host VM ephemeral disks means the file system needs to perform well with few but very large files and usually machines don't try to compete for access to the same file, except for during live migration.
- Needs to handle scale well (large number of nodes, manage a volume of tens of terabytes and file sizes of tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and handle online operations like increasing the volume size.
- Since the cluster FS is already running on a distributed storage system (Ceph), the file system does not need to concern itself with things like replication. Just needs to not get corrupted and be fast of course.
Anybody here that can help me shed some light on the following questions:
- Are there other cluster file systems to consider besides OCFS2 and GFS2?
- Which one would yield the best performance for our use case?
- Is anybody doing this already and willing to share their experience?
- Is there anything important that you think we might have missed?
Your help is very much appreciated!
Thanks!
Tom
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