OpenVZ: Mounting Host Devices/Partitions/Directories In A Container With Bind Mounts (Debian/Ubuntu)

Sometimes you are in a situation where you need to mount a hard
drive, partiiton or directory from the OpenVZ host inside an OpenVZ
container – fo…

Ring-based consistent hashing is one of my favorite algorithms. It’s an elegant solution to a common set of problems, and many times I’ve seen people’s eyes light up when they realize that finding data among a set of servers doesn’t have to involve central directories or expensive lookups. Systems based on this capability are still […]

Striping Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 12.04

This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of
logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can
be assigned to multiple physical devices in a…

A while ago, I wrote about my High Speed Replication translator, comparing it to the existing method of replication. Bottom line: my version was about 50% faster for small synchronous random writes at the time. Well, times have changed. Here’s part of the commit message for my latest update to HSR. This version works with […]

Node Install
So lets begin by installing the a node. The node install is pretty standard but there are a few very important steps that have to be done or it wont work correctly. All the issues I have found have been put into bugzilla. Before you begi…

Gluster Volume Setup
Now that all the nodes are setup and added to the cluster we need to tweak a few settings create our 1st volume and add it to the data center. Before completing these steps please make sure you have gone though and confirm you hav…

Functional languages replace the need for mutability by providing us with convenient, idiomatic mechanisms for defining transformations without explicitly modifying or assigning variables.  This level of decoupling transparently provides us with n…

Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 12.04

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers
(running Ubuntu 12.04) to one large storage server (distributed storage)
with GlusterFS.
The client sy…

As people who attended my recent Red Hat Summit talk are aware, one of the big issues with GlusterFS replication is “split brain” which occurs when conflicting updates are made to replicas of a file. Self-healing in the wrong direction risks data loss, so we won’t do self-heal if we detect split brain and we’ll […]

Starting with GlusterFS 3.3, one change has been the check to see if a directory (or any of it’s ancestors) is already part of a volume. This is causing many support questions in #gluster.
This was implemented because if you remove a brick from a volum…

The big, bad Eclipse is great for whipping a massive java source tree into shape, fast.  But for Clojure – its a different, more thoughtful development idiom.  You don’t need to browse complex type hierarchies and fold 1000s of lines of code …

Within the past couple weeks, Fedora and Gluster rolled out new versions, packed with too many features to discuss in a single blog post. However, a couple of the stand-out updates in each release overlap neatly enough to tackle them together–namely, the inclusion of OpenStack Essex in Fedora 17 and support for using Gluster 3.3 as a […]

Probably everybody who cares already knows that GlusterFS 3.3 has been released. I find it amusing that quorum enforcement is listed as one of the marquee features, since it’s really such a trivial bit of code compared to the other features on the list, or to internal but significant changes such as the new GFID-based […]

Our fearless engineering leader, Vijay, aka hagarth, has kindly posted a HOWTO on upgrading to GlusterFS 3.3. Please read before doing anything dumb!  

Now that GlusterFS 3.3.0 is out, here is a quick primer on upgrading from earlier installed versions of GlusterFS. This howto covers upgrades from 3.1.x and 3.2.x versions of GlusterFS. 1) GlusterFS 3.3.0 is not compatible with any earlier released versions. Please make sure that you schedule a downtime before you upgrade. 2) Stop all […]

Today, we’re announcing the next generation of GlusterFS, version 3.3. The release has been a year in the making and marks several firsts: the first post-acquisition release under Red Hat, our first major act as an openly-governed project and our first foray beyond NAS. We’ve also taken our first steps towards merging big data and …Read more

The release of GlusterFS 3.3.0 by the Gluster Community marks a major milestone in Clustered File Storage. GlusterFS is the leading open source solution for the dramatically increasing volume of unstructured data. It is a software-only, highly available, scale-out, centrally managed storage pool that can be backed by any POSIX filesystem that supports extended attributes, such as Ext3/4, XFS, BTRFS and many more.

As an example of Red Hat’s goal of building strong, independent, open source communities, GlusterFS 3.3.0 marks the first release as an “upstream” project with its own release schedule. This release addresses many of the most commonly requested features including proactive self-healing, quorum enforcement, and granular locking for self-healing, as well as many more bug fixes and enhancements.

Some of the more noteworthy features include:

• Unified File and Object storage – Blending OpenStack’s Object Storage API  with GlusterFS provides simultaneous read and write access to data as files or as objects.
• HDFS compatibility – Gives Hadoop admins the ability to run map/reduce jobs on unstructured data on GlusterFS and access the data with well-known tools and shell scripts.
• Proactive self-healing – GlusterFS volumes will now automatically restore file integrity after a replica recovers from failure.
• Granular locking – Allows large files to be accessed even during self-healing, a feature that is particularly important for VM images.
• Replication improvements – with quorum enforcement you are assured that  your data has been written in at least the configured number of places before the file operation returns, allowing a user-configurable adjustment to fault tolerance vs performance.

Visit Gluster.org to download. Packages are available for most distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS.

Get involved! Join us on #gluster on freenode, join our mailing list, ‘like’ our Facebook page, follow us on twitter, or check out our LinkedIn group.

GlusterFS is an open source project sponsored by Red Hat®, who uses it in its line of Red Hat Storage products.

A lot of changes were committed recently to the gluster-wireshark repository. A lot of effort was put into the details (click on the image to enlarge):UUIDs and GFIDs are now displayed as 4-2-2-2-6 bytesflags for OPEN, CREATE etc are now shown in detai…

A lot of changes were committed recently to the gluster-wireshark repository. A lot of effort was put into the details (click on the image to enlarge):UUIDs and GFIDs are now displayed as 4-2-2-2-6 bytesflags for OPEN, CREATE etc are now shown in detai…

[From an email to the gluster-devel mailinglist]  today I have merged support for GlusterFS 3.2 and 3.3 into one Wireshark ‘dissector’. The packages with date 20120516 in the version support both the current stable 3.2.x version, and the latest 3….