We have a need for a large cluster of virtual machines running on both VMware ESXi and KVM. I have about 20 intel type servers, each with about 500(GB) disks. I don't have a SAN and have no budget. What is the best way to create shared storage - using some of the servers - to be used by the hypervisors (the remaining servers) for virtual machine images and to enable live migrations (vmotion)?
I have looked into AoE, NFS, GFS, etc. but have not yet started testing any of these options out...
Does anyone out there have similar setup and have a tested solution?

Thanks in advance!

You definitely want to look at GlusterFS:

http://www.gluster.org/

http://www.gluster.com/

http://www.gluster.com/community/doc....php/Main_Page

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Midmarket/G...rvices-148680/

Here's an article that gives you a bit more persective:
http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/233/32/

'Hope that helps .. PSM

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks! Great article on clustermonkey. Yes, I have definitely been looking into GlusterFS, it sounds like the perfect solution for us. We will be testing it out soon.

Has anyone actually used GlusterFS as shared storage for running Virtual Machines? Curious if good performance is achievable with a 1 GbE network and 8 or so servers. Thinking of using the above servers as nodes with disks configured as RAID0 since fault tolerance can be handled using GlusterFS?

Also, considering using Gluster native client on hypervisors for better performance. Any compatibility issues with VMware ESXi and the native client?