[gpfsug-discuss] GPFS inside OpenStack guests

[Simon Thompson (Research Computing - IT Services)]

On 19/11/2014 14:56, "orlando.richards at ed.ac.uk"
<orlando.richards at ed.ac.uk> wrote:

>>
>>And how about attaching to the netowkrk as neutron networking uses per
>>tenant networks, so how would you actually get access to the gpfs
>>cluster?
>
>This bit is where I can see the potential pitfall. OpenStack naturally
>uses NAT to handle traffic to and from guests - will GPFS cope with
>nat'ted clients in this way?


Well, not necessarily, I was thinking about this and potentially you could
create an external shared network which is bound to your GPFS interface,
though there¹s possible security questions maybe around exposing a real
internal network device into a VM.

I think there is also a Mellanox driver for the VPI Pro cards which allow
you to pass the card through to instances. I can¹t remember if that was
just acceleration for Ethernet or if it could do IB as well.

>Also - could you make each hypervisor an NFS server for its guests, thus
>doing away with the need for CNFS, and removing the potential for the nfs
>server threads bottlenecking? For instance - if I have 300 worker nodes,
>and 7 NSD servers - I'd then have 300 NFS servers running, rather than 7

Would you then not need to have 300 server licenses though?

Simon