Hi all,

I am interested in your new product Torus. I have no experience with CoreOS 
yet, so I do not know the full capabilities or restrictions it has. Anyway, 
the blog post 
<https://coreos.com/blog/torus-distributed-storage-by-coreos.html> states 
that it uses 'multiple ways' to expose itself to user applications. I am 
looking into numerous distributed storage software solutions, which have to 
be able to:


   - Provide constant high speed remote storage
   - Provide highly available PXE boot capabilities for Linux clients using 
   NFS
   - Preferably be able provide these services in a *2 node *cluster
   
The PXE boot does not necessarily need to be extremely fast, as long as the 
OS can boot in a reasonable time (at most 3 minutes). So some added 
overhead of running NFS over a block level distributed solution would not 
be a big problem, because once the OS is loaded it does not really do much 
besides writing data to the high speed remote storage. Of course if the NFS 
storage can provide the necessary I/O it would be perfect to use as both 
PXE boot and high speed remote storage. It is also a big preference if this 
can be done in a two node cluster, meaning that there is no external NFS 
server that has the storage devices mounted and exports it to the clients. 


Anyway, my question is: 


Does Torus provide native NFS support, or

Would it be possible to run an NFS server on the storage nodes and use ip 
failover (pacemaker/corosync?) to make it highly available?


Unless Torus has built-in failover capabilities for an active/passive 
setup, one possible way I see is creating an active/active setup by having 
the storage nodes themselves mounting the NBD devices  format it as OCFS2, 
NFS export it on all nodes and use corosync+pacemaker to provide a floating 
IP to which the clients can connect. 


Looking forward to the response, as Torus seems very promising!

Reply via email to