I want to build network file system on top of my VMWare ESXi based virtual nodes which are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I am evalaluating options and found that GlusterFS (http://www.gluster.org/) can turn out to be a good choice.

Purpose: I have about 2 dozen VM nodes with different configurations, on 2 physical nodes which has following configuration: 16 core Intel Xeon 1 TB 48 GB RAM Now as I said earlier each Physical server has about 1TB hdd and I can increase if I want additional so for now I have 2TB disk space available, these space is distributed in VM nodes I have created on which about 2 dozen VM nodes live. Now some of them being application server and mgmt server, they have plenty of free disk space which I want to utilize for some heavy storage which I can not design if I do that individually on single VM node. This way if my storage is distributed between dozens of VM nodes and about 2 or more physical nodes I have some sort of backup as well. I do not mind if data gets stored redundently but per my knowledge it might hapeen that individual VM nodes will not be able to store all of the data because complete data size for example if we take 100GB will exceed VM disk size of 70GB and then VM will also have system and program files on it.

I need some suggestion that will GlusterFS be the solution for which I am looking forward to or I should go with something like hadoop? I am not too sure. But yes, I would like to utilize my free space on each VM node and while doing that if I get store data redundently I am okay because it will give me data security.