Hi! So no, no native NFS support; that's a bit orthogonal. You could run NFS on the storage nodes; for booting purposes this is probably fine, but it's not high-speed storage yet. OCFS2 is a trick we haven't tried (and it wouldn't work, currently, block devices get locked when mounted to prevent people from doing the wrong thing; using something like OCFS2 is possible, but we need to do a relatively small amount of work to allow folks like yourself to relax that restriction).
Since high availability is your goal, and it's explicitly two nodes, I suppose you could use Torus as effectively a replication tool, such that if one of the hosts goes down, the other still has the data (and can serve it). There's no built in failover for the mount point -- that's more in the realm of Kubernetes or another scheduler, same with the floating IP notion. I'm glad you're interested, and welcome giving it a try and finding bugs, but it's also a brand new prototype project, so don't expect too much from it. ;) PXE booting is within scope for what it might be able to help you with, though. --Barak On Friday, June 3, 2016 at 7:34:41 AM UTC-7, Jelle Holtkamp wrote: > > 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! >
