[Lustre-discuss] Fwd: Simple servers as storage nodes

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 19:15 +0300, Stas Oskin wrote:
> Hi.

Hello,

> Actually I'd prefer an approach where these boxes do other tasks, but
> depends on the solution.

For a Lustre solution, you should dedicate the Linux boxes to sharing
their storage out.  For stability and performance, these machines should
not do any other tasks other than being a Lustre server.

> >Do you have any expectations that these Linux boxes
> >will also be able to access that unified volume or will there be
> other
> >Linux machines accessing the unified volume?
> 
> Both would be great.

Putting Lustre clients on the servers can trigger memory pressure
deadlocks in the situation where the client needs to flush (i.e. to the
server on the same node) some pages (again, due to memory pressure) yet
the server on the same node needs to allocate pages to receive the
client's pages -- it will fail for the same reason the client is trying
to free pages.  For this reason we suggest against putting clients and
OSTs on the same machine.

Cheers,
b.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-discuss-lustre.org/attachments/20090330/721fac1e/attachment.pgp>