[lustre-discuss] Lustre 2.7 deployment issues

[Mohr Jr, Richard Frank (Rick Mohr)]

> On Dec 4, 2015, at 9:48 AM, Ray Muno <muno at umn.edu> wrote:
> 
> I started with 2.7 since that is what I got pointed to when I went to the lustre.org download page. The "Most Recent Release" points me at the 2.7.0 tree.  If I follow the path to download source on that page,


Lustre 2.7 is the most recent release, but with Lustre, the most recent release doesn’t necessarily imply the most stable release.  The most recent “stable” release that is publicly available is 2.5.3.

Some brief history:  Lustre used to have two types of releases.  The feature releases (2.5, 2.6, 2.7, etc) were intended to roll out new features and this is where the development work progressed.  These were intended to get released roughly every 6 months.  At some point, a release would be chosen to become the starting point for maintenance releases.  The maintenance releases were meant to focus on stability and bug fixes.  For a while, it was Lustre 2.4 (which resulted in version 2.4.1 - 2.4.3) and then it became Lustre 2.5 (giving us 2.5.1-2.5.3).  Not every feature release gave rise to a maintenance release (hence no 2.6.1).  Intel was managing both feature and maintenance releases for a while, but this past year they stopped providing the publicly available maintenance releases.  (I believe Intel had a contract with OpenSFS to provide public maintenance releases, but that contract ended. If you have an Intel support contract, I assume you get maintenance releases for more recent versions.)  But I know there are sites running 2.7 in production.

There is a support matrix for previous Lustre releases that shows supported OS versions:

  https://wiki.hpdd.intel.com/display/PUB/Lustre+Support+Matrix

In summary, 

  Status of Lustre maintenance releases = It’s complicated

--
Rick Mohr
Senior HPC System Administrator
National Institute for Computational Sciences
http://www.nics.tennessee.edu