[Sheepdog] general question about sheepdog operation (block distribution)

[Matthew Law]

On Mon, October 31, 2011 4:18 pm, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Thanks guys.  (FYI - I currently run DRBD over a pair of nodes that each
run md raid 10 - as I go to 4 nodes, I've  been looking at different
ways of establishing a reliable storage environment that allows VMs to
migrate.)

I think I have a similar requirement.  We currently run customer VMs on
Xen 3.4 host running a mixture of MD RAID and hardware RAID cards.  We
haven't had a great experience with the I/O performance of standalone KVM
VMs compared to Xen on the same hardware and a debian stable base, so at
the moment we would like to aim for Xen with the VM images on 'some kind
of clustered storage'.

I have high hopes that we might be able to achieve this one day with xen,
ganeti and sheepdog.  I am unsure of the pro's and con's of sheepdog over,
say, Ceph or Gluster for such a use case but I do like the way that
sheepdog works and it's relative simplicity (I really don't want to go
anywhere near iSCSI or ATAoE ever again!).  If kvm's I/O issues can be
isolated and fixed for our use case then for me it would come down to
integrating sheepdog with ganeti.

I am already looking at integrating sheepdog and ganeti as well as writing
some test cases for sheepdog/collie but the workload on the run-up to
Christmas is getting in the way a little.


Cheers,

Matt.