Message: 3 Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2011 13:41:31 -0500 From: Greg_Swift at aotx.uscourts.gov Subject: Re: single or multiple bricks per server To: Chip Gonzales <chipgz at gmail.com> Cc: gluster-users at gluster.org, gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org Message-ID: <OFE1A8AA9E.16AD9284-ON862578C0.00666B83-862578C0.0066AA34 at uscmail.uscourts.gov> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org wrote on 06/30/2011 03:52:54 PM: > I have 3 servers with 7 disks each, is it better to use each > individual disk as brick (several bricks per server). ?Or to have > them as a raid volume that presents as a single brick per server? > > I'm setting them up as a replicated volume across all three servers. In our environment (several hundred volumes over several servers that had several bricks) we were told that a lot of our issues stemmed from the number of bricks per volume. We are now going to a max of 2 bricks local to each node, using lvm. We are using 2 instead of 1 because we are separating for replica pairings. -greg I'm hoping that someone at Gluster will step forward on this one because this just doesn't sound correct. I have two servers with 8x2TB drives each and each one is configured as a brick. I have set up replicated and distributed so server 0/drive 0 is mirrored to server 1/drive 0 ... That's 8 bricks per server and I'm having no problems. That way if a drive goes bad, I replace and re-mirror from/to a single drive. If I use in-server RAID, I either lose space to raid parity (RAID5/RAID5) or waste a lot of drive space (RAID-10) before I even get to replicate across the servers. If I used in-server RAID and lost a RAIDset, I would have to replicate the entire 16TB volume which would take too long and be a performance hog. I decided to use replicate for mirroring and then use distribute to act as striping mechanism to eliminate these two issues. Up for 18 months without any problems, so I'm pretty happy. I've also see people post on this mailing list that had hundreds of bricks in a single volume, so I'm pretty sure that works. Can someone clarify that for us? Larry Bates vitalEsafe, Inc.
