A couple times a year someone comes in to #gluster and thinks it would be awesome to ave a puppet module that you could define servers and the pupet module would automatically manage adding those servers as peers and dynamically changing volumes to uti…
We are very pleased to inform you that GlusterFS 3.4 has now hit GA! This marks an incredible milestone for the Gluster community, and pushes GlusterFS into exciting new directions, including virtual block storage, OpenStack integration and a lot more. -> Download here. Changes Of Note Improvements for Virtual Machine Image Storage A number of …Read more
I went into this expecting problems. Fedora 19 ships with GlusterFS 3.4.0 beta and I’m using GlusterFS 3.3 in production. I expected that I would have to downgrade my Fedora packages so I could use my volumes. I expected problems.
What I didn’t expect …
Somebody today asked if GlusterFS could be made as fast as a local filesystem. My answer just came out without a ton of thought behind it, but I found it rather profound.
Comparing (any) clustered filesystem to a local filesystem is like comparing appl…
Heading to LinuxCon Japan 2013? If you’ll be attending the conference or will be in Tokyo on May 31st, we’d like to welcome you at the Gluster Community Workshop. We’ll have a full day of talks on all things Gluster, including: Creating a Shared Storage Service with GlusterFS by Keisuke Takahashi Converged Infrastructure: Leveraging oVirt …Read more
Had a potential GlusterFS user state that the filesystem incorrectly reported that a write succeeded even though all the servers were powered off. Since this sounded rather impossible, I asked for details and duplicated the problem. This is the php cod…
Amazon Web Services provides an highly available hosting for our applications but are they prepared to run on more than one server? When you design a new application, you can follow best practices’ guides on AWS but if the application is inherited, it requires many modifications or to work with a POSIX shared storage as if it’s local. That’s where GlusterFS enters the game, beside adding flexibility to storage with horizontal growth opportunities in distributed mode, it has a replicated mode, which lets you replicate a volume (or a single folder in a file system) across multiple servers. Preliminary considerations Before realizing a proof of concept with two servers, in different availability zones, replicating an EBS volume with an ext4 filesystem, we will list the cases where GlusterFS should not be used: Sequential files written simultaneously from multiple servers such as logs. The locking system can lead to serious problems if you store … Continued
Slides from my talk on GlusterFS 3.4 in the recently concluded Gluster Community Summit can be found here.
I intend adding more details about some of the new features in the days to come.
A few of our projects recently called for a distributed file-system that provided high availability and redundancy. After a tip off from a fellow techie and a quick browse around the net it appeared that a solution called GlusterFS appeared to tick all the boxes for what we were wanting. However setting it up turned […]
In mixed results, some users have been reporting issues with mounting GlusterFS volumes at boot time. I spun up a VM at Rackspace to see what I could see.
For my volume I used the following fstab entry. The host is defined in /etc/hosts:
server1:testvo…
Hello there, I recently started working on GlusterFS, realizing one of my long awaited dreams of working on a opensource product. This is my new blog for documenting things I learn during this journey. If you are an elite guy, and somehow happened to come across my blog, do tell me if I could be […]
What is a replicated filesystem?
A replicated filesystem is one that stores data across multiple storage devices. Some replicated filesystem designs work at the block level, some at the file level, and some use a hybrid of both concepts.
DRBD is an exa…
In a distributed hash table lookup, like that used by GlusterFS, misses are expensive. Let’s look at how it works and why misses are “bad”.
How DHT works
When you open() a file, the distribute translator is giving one piece of information to find your …
The Cascadia IT Conference is looking for sponsors and proposals for talks, tutorials and panels.
Lets get this thing started! Cascadia IT Conference 2013 is March 15,16. Submit your proposals now. Earlier is better casitconf.org/casitconf13/cf&hellip…
GlusterFS is a distributed file system implemented in user space. It is strictly not a native file system in itself but is an aggregator of different file systems. GlusterFS can aggregate individual file system mount points or directories (called bricks in gluster terminology) to provide a single unified file system namespace. In addition to NFS […]
I’m happy to announce the availability of UFO Pilot, an HTML5 web app for accessing a Gluster UFO/OpenStack Swift object store from your Android or iOS mobile device.
Feel free to download it from Github and offer your feedback.
As an aside, Gluster …
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…
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…
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…