[Linux-cluster] Clustering storage using RHCS to store VMs

Steven Whitehouse swhiteho at redhat.com
Mon Mar 15 11:20:27 UTC 2010


Hi,

On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 11:50 +0100, carlopmart wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   I need to setup a rhcs with two nodes to use it for delivery storage for vmware 
> esxi 4 and rhel5.4 kvm hosts.
> 
>   Which type of filesystem is best to use on this topology to serve it via NFS for 
> esxi and rhel5.4 kvm hosts: gfs2 or ext4??
> 
That depends on whether you need multiple nodes exporting the same
filesystem or not.

>   In the case of gfs2, is it a good idea to mount gfs2 filesystems with 
> noatime,nodiratime and noquota options to use it with VMs??
> 
The nodiratime option is currently not supported. Only noatime is
required, and that is always a good plan unless you really need atime
support. Whether it makes sense to use noquota really depends on whether
you need quotas or not.

>   An important point is the able to use thin provisioning feature incorporated in 
> esxi 4. VMware documentation says that this feature it is delimited by the nfs 
> server ... then, both (ext4 and gfs2) can do this??
> 
> Thanks.

Recent gfs2 can do that. Older versions cannot. It also depends upon
whether you have an I/O stack which can deliver those requests to the
underlying storage too, not just on the fs itself,

Steve.





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