I'm planning to use GlusterFS on 2 nodes as storage for virtual machines with qemu/KVM.

My concern is:
If I use qcow2-format, a big file is written to the GlusterFS, which needs to be synchronized and since the virtual server will always put some data to it's storage, the file will always be altered -> so the GlusterFS has to synchronize a big 200G-file everytime ?!?
Is it possible to simply share a directory for the virtual server, where only the altered files have to be synchronized?
Or is the way to have the boot-partition in a qcow2-file and mount the root-filesystem via NFS?

You have a lot going on and there may be other ways to do this.

Some ideas.
qcow2 should act like any drive but it has limits. You can remove some of them by preallocating the size so that it doesn't want to grow on a write. That also almost makes most of qcow2 a raw and you may simply wish to use a raw image.

It is possible to share directories in almost all vm's. As to when that is available to the OS may be an issue.


Yes, using a nfs or even something like iscsi is common.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just few things or ideas as I read on subject not long ago.

I guess you know that GlusterFS advise to use 3 nodes minimum ?

To share files between guest and host 9P filesystem exists.

Several docs I read use raw VM format, it seems obvious but I did not understand why. And I don't know if GlusterFS has to be set replica or not...

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks a lot, guys