Last month, I received two new servers to replace two of our three (replica 3) GlusterFS servers. My first inclination was to just down the server, move the hard drives into the new server, re-install the OS (moving from 32 bit to 64 bit), and voila, d…

Greetings, If you’ve been trying to access the download server, I’m afraid it continues to be offline. We will try to have a replacement up and running by tomorrow. In the meantime, you can still access release tarballs via bits.gluster.com or from our GitHub repo. And before anyone asks: no, this was not a filesystem …Read more

One of the most common knocks against GlusterFS is that it eats too many CPU cycles. For example: Really not liking GlusterFS now. Performance is quite poor and CPU usage way too high for what it does. I’ve talked about performance issues and expectations many times. With regard to CPU usage, I can’t resist saying […]

A little while back, I tested out the Unified File and Object feature in Gluster 3.3, which taps OpenStack’s Swift component to handle the object half of the file and object combo. It took me kind of a long time to get it all running, so I was pleased to find this blog post promising a […]

This has come up several times in the last week. “I have 2n servers with 2 or 4 bricks each and I want to add 1 more server. How do I ensure the new server isn’t a replica of itself?”
This isn’t a simple thing to do. When you add bricks, replicas are a…

Greetings, If you’ve noticed some wonky behavior in the mailing lists this morning, it’s due to a DNS switchover. Unfortunately, we have to wait for the reverse DNS to be implemented before everyone can get mail sent to the gluster.org lists. Please hold tight – thanks!

Back in February 2011, when I joined what ultimately became part of the GlusterFS development team at Red Hat, I had already been interested in low power — as in low power consumption — computing for a long time. For most of my earlier explorations I had used a Linksys WRT54G[1] router — which uses …Read more

This concept is thrown around a lot. People frequently say that “GlusterFS is slow with small files”, or “how can I increase small file performance” without really understanding what they mean by “small files” or even “slow”.
“Small files” is sort of a…

Version 3.3 introduced a new structure to the bricks, the .glusterfs directory. So what is it?
The GFID
As you’re probably aware, GlusterFS stores metadata info in extended attributes. One of these bits of metadata is the “trusted.gfid”. This is, for a…

This sets up a GlusterFS Unified File and Object (UFO) server on a single node (single brick) Gluster server using the RPMs contained in my YUM repo at http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/kkeithle/glusterfs/. This repo contains RPMs for Fedora 16, Fedora 17, and RHEL 6. Alternatively you may use the glusterfs-3.4.0beta1 RPMs from the GlusterFS YUM repo at http://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/qa-releases/3.4.0beta1/ …Read more

This post is about parsimonious planning, back-of-the-envelope engineering, and extreme productivity. By back of the envelope, we don’t mean flow charting.  Rather, we mean real world consideration of the quantitative aspects of all of the major…

I forgot to post this at the time, but I had a lovely conversation with Richard Morrell, aka the “Cloud Evangelist” at Red Hat’s UK office. Richard is a jolly bloke with a fair bit to say on all things cloud. We talked about GlusterFS, the Gluster community, and also about Red Hat’s upcoming Developer …Read more

If you were a customer of Gluster, Inc. back in the day, you may already be familiar with Eco’s handiwork. I’m happy to report that he’s now full-time on the community side, writing docs, doing meetups and conferences, and doing everything it takes to teach users and developers how to fish. Here’s a video of …Read more

I have been very excited by the progress made recently on the libgfapi and QEMU driver fronts recently. With recently added code to the master branches of QEMU and GlusterFS, you can now talk directly from QEMU to GlusterFS, bypassing FUSE. See the demo video below for an example of how it works: Outstanding stuff! …Read more

One of the cooler new features in oVirt 3.1 is the platform’s support for creating and managing Gluster volumes. oVirt’s web admin console now includes a graphical tool for configuring these volumes, and vdsm, the service for responsible for controlling oVirt’s virtualization nodes, has a new sibling, vdsm-gluster, for handling the back end work. Gluster and […]

GlusterFS spreads load using a distribute hash translation (DHT) of filenames to it’s subvolumes. Those subvolumes are usually replicated to provide fault tolerance as well as some load handling. The advanced file replication translator (AFR) departs f…

Back at the end of 2003 I was toying with Gnutella’s distributed peer-to-peer network and wanted to host a peer lookup server myself. I tried several cache servers but most of them didn’t support the newer protocol and would frequently fail. I wrote my…

I’ve been working on a puppet module for gluster. Both this, my puppet-gfs2 module, and other puppet clustering modules all share a common problem: How does one make sure that only certain operations happen on one node at a time? … Continue reading →

On Sunday, March 18th, Fan Yong commited a patch against ext4 to “return 32/64-bit dir name hash according to usage type”. Prior to that, ext2/3/4 would return a 32-bit hash value from telldir()/seekdir() as NFSv2 wasn’t designed to accomidate anything…

I’m trying to use openstack for my 2 vm hosts. I think that this will puppetize better than how I’m doing it now. Primarily, I think OpenStack will offer more flexibility when I need to schedule hardware maintenance as it will handle which compute node…