Cool User File Systems: GlusterFS

I've been using Gluster in a production environment for over a year now with an absolutely perfect track record. I use it for the "centralized" filesystem for a virtualization cluster (using KVM). Currently, I have three virt hosts setup with dual NICs each to get 2Gbps throughput, sharing a RAID1-style filesystem (with priorities to the local copy for r/w speed).

I was (and still am) fairly skeptical about using Gluster in this role for a production environment having come from a fiber/SAN shop before. However, I gained a lot of faith in Gluster after a non-incident a few months back. One of our core switches fell offline (the one all three virt hosts were plugged into) and remained offline for about an hour I believe. When the switch was brought back online, Gluster managed to put everything back together and continue operation without any human intervention. All 20 or so VMs were still humming along like nothing had ever happened. fsck confirmed this.

Even in the case of a failure (which I've not experienced), your data is still sitting on disk (at least that's how it is with RAID1, I don't know how it's RAID0 setup works) -- you'll always have access to the raw files Gluster uses.

No. Just no. Untested, unproven, and unstable. I've made comments about this before, but the short of it is: don't trust your production file system to something only researchers use.

When the developers of the product can't get it to work on your servers, and you've lost a good 3-4 days of uptime, you'll rethink not buying that SAN.