[Lustre-discuss] Future of lustre 1.8.3+/Debian support

Christopher Huhn C.Huhn at gsi.de
Fri May 21 05:34:32 PDT 2010


Hi Ramiro,

Ramiro Alba Queipo wrote:
> By the way are you using Debian and Lustre? If positive, what is your
> feeling?
>   
Right now we are running Lustre 1.6.7.2 on Debian Etch. The current size 
is net 1 PB (100+ OSS servers, gross 1.6 PB) and roughly 500 number 
crunchers running Debian Etch and Lenny.
 From the Lustre point of view the installation is rather low end "cheap 
and big" scratch space - no infiniband, no OSS/OST failover ...

We plan to migrate to 1.8.3+ on Debian Lenny but this will still need 
some testing and preparations.

Overall the cluster runs quite fine and we have no indication that the 
problems we had and have are specific to Debian.
We are running Debian for almost 15 years and have no plans to run a 
larger quantity of servers on a non-Debian based distro (a handful of 
server run SLES for proprietary products with expensive support contracts).
Ubuntu LTS is also an opportunity for server installations but we still 
have to evaluate this.

What worries us is that the Lustre server patches do not appear to 
progress towards integration into the mainline kernel but rather away 
from it, which makes porting to Debian (and up-to-date kernels in 
general) more and more difficult.

It is obvious that this is no major goal in Oracles business model, but 
I fear that in the long term Lustre development momentum will be 
diverted to alternative technologies like Ceph that integrate better 
into Linux kernel development just the way Xen failed to keep up with 
the Linux kernel and has more or less been superseded by KVM nowadays.

Anyhow there is no convincing alternative to Lustre today for our use case.

Regards,
    Christopher




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