Best distributed filesystem for CentOS 7?
Posted: 2023/11/29 22:49:15
I've been pulling my hair trying to set up a redundant e-mail server out of one CentOS 7 node and two modern Debian-based nodes (one Debian and one MX Linux). I can probably figure out the e-mail part if and whenever I get to it, but the distributed storage part is kicking my butt. Nothing seems to work for me across these two distributions.
First I tried GlusterFS: The Debian nodes have Gluster versions 9 and 10, but the newest I could find for CentOS 7 was Gluster 7.8, which is incompatible with the newer versions.
Then I tried Ceph: This was the most confusing. All of the tutorials I found say to do completely different things. I made some progress with ChatGPT but she eventually got stuck walking me around in circles. I just have no clue how to use this program and I couldn't find any noob-friendly guide anywhere. When I asked their community for help I was told DRBD or ZFS may be better options for my use case, which is what led me to...
...giving DRBD a shot: I thought this would work after I got all of the nodes on the same version, but then I realized that version (drbd 8) only supports two nodes while my setup requires three, a feature which apparently was introduced in drbd 9. CentOS isn't the problem here - it is actually the Debians I couldn't find a damned drbd 9 kernel module package for. Building a kernel module from scratch is not something I'd trust myself to do successfully, specially after reading the build guide for it.
I know I'm not the only CentOS user that's ever needed something like this so I beg for your assistance. Buying a fourth cheap node is an option for my wallet but not for my pride. I know CentOS is dead blah blah blah - tell that to my torrent client that's still seeding it regularly. Dead or not, it should be able to do something like this, right?
First I tried GlusterFS: The Debian nodes have Gluster versions 9 and 10, but the newest I could find for CentOS 7 was Gluster 7.8, which is incompatible with the newer versions.
Then I tried Ceph: This was the most confusing. All of the tutorials I found say to do completely different things. I made some progress with ChatGPT but she eventually got stuck walking me around in circles. I just have no clue how to use this program and I couldn't find any noob-friendly guide anywhere. When I asked their community for help I was told DRBD or ZFS may be better options for my use case, which is what led me to...
...giving DRBD a shot: I thought this would work after I got all of the nodes on the same version, but then I realized that version (drbd 8) only supports two nodes while my setup requires three, a feature which apparently was introduced in drbd 9. CentOS isn't the problem here - it is actually the Debians I couldn't find a damned drbd 9 kernel module package for. Building a kernel module from scratch is not something I'd trust myself to do successfully, specially after reading the build guide for it.
I know I'm not the only CentOS user that's ever needed something like this so I beg for your assistance. Buying a fourth cheap node is an option for my wallet but not for my pride. I know CentOS is dead blah blah blah - tell that to my torrent client that's still seeding it regularly. Dead or not, it should be able to do something like this, right?