[Beowulf] how cluster's storage can be flexible/expandable?

[Duke Nguyen]

On 11/12/12 4:42 PM, Tim Cutts wrote:
> On 12 Nov 2012, at 03:50, Duke Nguyen <duke.lists at gmx.com> wrote:
>
>> On 11/9/12 7:26 PM, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Christopher Samuel
>>> <samuel at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>>> So JBODs with LVM on top and XFS on top of that could be resized on
>>>> the fly.  You can do the same with ext[34] as well (from memory).
>> We also thought of using LVM on top of RAID disks, but never think of
>> XFS. Why do we need XFS and how does this compare with GPFS?
> XFS is not a parallel filesystem like GPFS, but a lot of us use it because it's so easy to grow the filesystem.  I frequently do this with virtual machines to expand their storage.
>
> 1)  Add new virtual disk
> 2)  Scan SCSI buses in Linux
> 3)  pvcreate the new device
> 4)  vgextend
> 5)  lvextend
> 6)  xfs_growfs
>
> Job done.
>
> On systems in our data centre, we tend to use XFS for most local filesystems, unless we have a good reason to use something else.

Is there any reason you do not use GlusterFS on top of XFS? Can I do 
that? With that, can I have a parallel system similar to GPFS?

Thanks,

D.