2.4. Cluster Considerations

When determining the number of nodes that your system will contain, note that there is a trade-off between high availability and performance. With a larger number of nodes, it becomes increasingly difficult to make workloads scale. For that reason, Red Hat does not support using GFS2 for cluster file system deployments greater than 16 nodes.

Deploying a cluster file system is not a "drop in" replacement for a single node deployment. We recommend that you allow a period of around 8-12 weeks of testing on new installations in order to test the system and ensure that it is working at the required performance level. During this period any performance or functional issues can be worked out and any queries should be directed to the Red Hat support team.

We recommend that customers considering deploying clusters have their configurations reviewed by Red Hat support before deployment to avoid any possible support issues later on.