Chipping in to the Cluster-Filesystem-Topic (in this case GlusterFS):
In my skydiving-club i've a setup exactly like that:
Two old commodity-PC (DELL's with an i5 and 8GB RAM each, 3 HD's each --> ada0=OS, ada1 and ada2 as Bricks) running FreeBSD as OS and GlusterFS.
The Gluster-Volume is setup as a 2x2 Distributed Replica (Brick1 on S1 replicated with Brick1 on S2 a.s.o.).
Meaning: If a Server goes down, all files are still accessible on the other Server (and i actually really got into that situation! Worked like promoted!)
On a Performance-Note: I didn't notice any grave differences in Performance/Speed for read and write (and i would have noticed that, since the Gluster-Volume is mainly used for Video-Files which on average are about 1.5-2.0GB in Size). At a guess i would say maybe up to 5% for a loss in Perf./Speed.
Lessons learned:
1) Use UFS for the Bricks, since Gluster doesn't play well with ZFS on FreeBSD (even mentioned on the official Gluster-Documenation) --> A sound backup-strategy is still needed (why would we have to discuss something essential like a backup-strategy?)
2) Setting up Samba to export the Gluster-Volume was a PITA, since i initally used the binary packages (pkg install samba), and missed, that the support for GlusterFS is per Default OFF. So i had to use ports for Samba.
In my skydiving-club i've a setup exactly like that:
Two old commodity-PC (DELL's with an i5 and 8GB RAM each, 3 HD's each --> ada0=OS, ada1 and ada2 as Bricks) running FreeBSD as OS and GlusterFS.
The Gluster-Volume is setup as a 2x2 Distributed Replica (Brick1 on S1 replicated with Brick1 on S2 a.s.o.).
Meaning: If a Server goes down, all files are still accessible on the other Server (and i actually really got into that situation! Worked like promoted!)
On a Performance-Note: I didn't notice any grave differences in Performance/Speed for read and write (and i would have noticed that, since the Gluster-Volume is mainly used for Video-Files which on average are about 1.5-2.0GB in Size). At a guess i would say maybe up to 5% for a loss in Perf./Speed.
Lessons learned:
1) Use UFS for the Bricks, since Gluster doesn't play well with ZFS on FreeBSD (even mentioned on the official Gluster-Documenation) --> A sound backup-strategy is still needed (why would we have to discuss something essential like a backup-strategy?)
2) Setting up Samba to export the Gluster-Volume was a PITA, since i initally used the binary packages (pkg install samba), and missed, that the support for GlusterFS is per Default OFF. So i had to use ports for Samba.