[Novalug] GFS vs NFS

Nick Danger nick@hackermonkey.com
Thu Oct 24 12:23:59 EDT 2013


I have inherited a big pile of existing servers. Annoyingly some of them 
(Xen cluster, Oracle servers) have a shared disk space (GFS) and were 
built with a earlier buggy version of GFS that doesn't free space 
correctly. About once a week I have to unmount it from the servers, fsck 
the volume and remount it. That is how it has been working for the year 
plus before I started here.  That annoyance aside, it does work ok. This 
is mostly for unix admin/oracle admin home directories, some shared 
backup space for rman, some shared logging space, and some scripts that 
all the machines use, nothing critical to OS of the machine itself (RHEL 
5.x) of the machine itself or Oracle itself.

These machines are going to be rebuilt, using RHEL 6.x on a massive 
VMWare infrastructure, and I am not so sure I want to continue with the 
whole GFS shared space thing. I could just use NFS for the few times the 
machines need to share disk space, which all in all is pretty infrequent.

So I ask all of you, why would YOU use GFS? Under my circumstances I 
don't see the benefit but it is also what is here already so I am on the 
fence about it. Maybe if I hear a few other use case scenarios, I might 
be swayed one way or the other.

Nick




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