ClusterFilesystems

Revision 11 as of 2005-04-27 06:47:47

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ClusterFilesystems

Status

Introduction

Establish a strategy to support cluster-oriented filesystems in Ubuntu

Rationale

We have a great opportunity and growing interest in the clustering space, thanks to Ubuntu's appropriateness for infrastructure deployments, predictable release and support cycles. We have already had interest from cluster administrators, and CFS support has been raised as a major feature that would tip the scales in favour of Ubuntu. It would also strengthen Ubuntu's reputation as a server operating system.

CFS Options

  1. GFS is already in Ubuntu! It doesn't scale as well as the other CFS, but is well known and quite popular.

  2. OCFS 2 is in beta, and may not be ready or appropriate for BreezyBadger. Jeff will contact Oracle about collaboration on this.

  3. Lustre is now on a delayed Free release cycle, and is administratively expensive, so without further discussion and/or support from clusterfs.com, it is unlikely that we will support Lustre in Ubuntu under our own steam.

Implementation Plan

  1. kernel side of GFS is already in our development tree. It will hit breezy at the first upload.
  2. the userland part of GFS and the entire RH cluster suite is already a work in progress and it is beta tested already in a 14 nodes cluster in germany. (expected another 2 weeks for first release in Breezy)
  3. there will be no d-i support to install on CFS for Breezy. We will evaluate the option for Breezy+1 on users input.
  4. as above there will be no rootfs over CFS.

Data Preservation and Migration

none

Packages Affected

1. linux-image-* (done)

User Interface Requirements

1. configuration of clusters is not something that can be done easily. These kind of environments are way to specific and related to the application that will run on it. We will provide an example configuration in the beginning and we will grow it only after users/administrators input.

Outstanding Issues

  • Plan for on-going maintenance of user space components and synchronisation with kernel code
  • d-i and kickstart integration for automated installs with GFS