Red Hat GFS 6.1 -, Administrator'S Manual

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Chapter 1.
GFS Overview
Red Hat GFS is a cluster file system that is available with Red Hat Cluster Suite. Red
Hat GFS nodes are configured and managed with Red Hat Cluster Suite configuration and
management tools. Red Hat GFS provides data sharing among GFS nodes in a Red Hat
cluster. GFS provides a single, consistent view of the file-system name space across the
GFS nodes in a Red Hat cluster. GFS allows applications to install and run without much
knowledge of the underlying storage infrastructure. GFS is fully compliant with the IEEE
POSIX interface, allowing applications to perform file operations as if they were running
on a local file system. Also, GFS provides features that are typically required in enterprise
environments, such as quotas, multiple journals, and multipath support.
GFS provides a versatile method of networking your storage according to the performance,
scalability, and economic needs of your storage environment. This chapter provides some
very basic, abbreviated information as background to help you understand GFS. It contains
the following sections:
•
Section 1.1 New and Changed Features
•
Section 1.2 Performance, Scalability, and Economy
•
Section 1.3 GFS Functions
•
Section 1.4 GFS Software Subsystems
•
Section 1.5 Before Setting Up GFS
1.1. New and Changed Features
This section lists new and changed features included with the initial release of Red Hat
Red Hat GFS 6.1 and Red Hat GFS 6.1 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 2.
For information about upgrading from GFS 6.0 to GFS 6.1, refer to Appendix A
Upgrading
GFS .
Note
Multipath GNBD is not available with Red Hat GFS 6.1. That is, device mapper multipath
(
dm-multipath
) cannot use GNBD. GNBD without multipath is available.
New and Changed Features with the Initial Release of Red Hat GFS 6.1