New tricks for XFS

Posted Feb 22, 2018 22:12 UTC (Thu) by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
In reply to: New tricks for XFS by nix
Parent article: New tricks for XFS

> I'll admit it. I want all this cool stuff *now* and I'm kicking myself that I re-mkfsed my big fileserver only eight months ago and can't convince myself to redo it like this instantly. :)

1. Convert big fileserver into two Gluster servers.
2. Reformat them with Cool Stuff one by one.
3. Beg the Gluster maintainers to integrate their tooling with the new XFS features.

New tricks for XFS

Posted Feb 22, 2018 22:44 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not sure how you convert one big machine into two servers. With an axe? (It has an odd number of disks in a RAID array -- not something I can evenly split :) ).

I am vaguely tempted to do something kinda similar with my new desktop, which will likely come with an MMC far too small to hold the fs I want to put on it, but *with* nice fast 10GbE (imagine my surprise to find that managed switches with a couple of 10GbE ports on have plunged in price to under £200 nowadays). I was thinking of putting Lustre on it as a way to split the metadata onto the MMC and the data onto the big machine over the 10GbE :) however, it's quite possible that NFSv4 onto a big RAID array over the 10GbE would be *faster*, particularly for writes. In practice I suspect I'll be happy with just nfsroot and ignoring the MMC entirely. (Which means I'll have to thunk to the fileserver to do snapshots etc in any case... though if I go to NFSv4.2 I will at least be able to do reflinks on the client.)

New tricks for XFS

Posted Feb 23, 2018 4:52 UTC (Fri) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm not sure how you convert one big machine into two servers. With an axe?

I find "being a pack rat with more cases and motherboards lying about than is reasonable" seems to work acceptably well ;). The odd number of disks is a bit trickier.

> I was thinking of putting Lustre on it as a way to split the metadata onto the MMC and the data onto the big machine over the 10GbE :)

Good heavens. That's a dedication to complexity! I'm moving my performance-sensitive Gluster FSes to use tiering, so I'm in no position to criticise, though.

> imagine my surprise to find that managed switches with a couple of 10GbE ports on have plunged in price to under £200 nowadays

The plunging price of network equipment continues to astonish me. They days where just management was a prohibitively expensive option are long gone, and I'm loving it.

New tricks for XFS

Posted Feb 24, 2018 20:06 UTC (Sat) by naptastic (guest, #60139) [Link]

> I find "being a pack rat with more cases and motherboards lying about than is reasonable" seems to work acceptably well ;). The odd number of disks is a bit trickier.

I've learned that the only way to know for sure that you have enough is to have too much.