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I am going to repurpose 5 servers from their previous use as computational servers to be a KVM system. This will become my sandbox for testing patches and for testing new software, configuration changes, etc. I want to use GlusterFS to create a storage pool for the KVM guests and as a restore location to enable easier restores from tape (i.e. restore a LUN to sandbox, move over the files to production). Ultimately I plan to test how GlusterFS can fulfill our storage needs.

Reading through the different implementations on GlusterFS docs page, I have questions regarding the type of volume to set up.

Five servers are each 4 processor, 1TB RAM, 50TB SAS RAID5, 4x10G CNA. Plus a sixth smaller server that would not be part of the Gluster setup.

Two questions:

  1. Can these servers serve as a KVM system, and have the GlusterFS underneath? Assuming, two virtual disks presented by the underlying hardware RAID system. First, a small one (two disks) for the OS and then the rest (14 disks) for Gluster. The systems are monsters, I think I can build something of a hyperconverged network from these 5.

  2. Assuming #1 is true, how do I choose between "Dispersed Distributed" and "Dispersed"? I have RAID5 on the systems now. I may upgrade to RAID6 if the cards accept it. So the redundancy afforded by Dispersed volume is really more for protection against losing a whole server or two due to other issues.

Jeter-work
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  • The [docs](https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Administrator%20Guide/Setting%20Up%20Volumes/) explain the difference between distributed and distributed dispersed. You almost certainly want the latter. And yes, this seems fine for hyperconverged KVM/Gluster. – Michael Hampton Dec 18 '18 at 00:23
  • @MichaelHampton The third question (which I removed) actually had to do with the redundancy level when using 5 servers in a dispersed volume. I surmised that RAID5 bricks and a redundancy level of 1 gives me sufficient redundancy for my uses. That was the driving force behind my post. As for Q2, I read the docs. Really. Dispersed sounds like it's already distributed, so what's with Distributed Dispersed? – Jeter-work Dec 18 '18 at 15:51

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