Gluster Filesystem - Practical Method

By Fabian Mestre

Gluster Filesystem is a scalable network file system, independent of hardware and with various data structuring schemes, which provides important integrations with Hyperconvergence platforms, Containers, Virtualization, among others. This ebook will allow you to get to know Gluster in a practical way, to get involved in the world of Software Defined Storage from conceptualization to configuration of functionalities on Gluster volumes.  With this practice guide, you will be able to implement   Gluster, to know its use cases, create Gluster Pools, create and publish volumes by FUSE, NFS or SMB, manage pools and bricks, as well as apply functionalities to volumes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fabian Mestre
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781386100263

Book preview

To God, my father.

To my wife Gina for her love and understanding, my daughters Sarita and Mia Carolina for their joy and motivation; thank you mom for giving me life and take care of me; to my father, in eternity; my nieces Sofi, Totonia and Yuliyu, your innocence, you are my unconditionals.

Thanks also to all those who have been part of my professional career and have contributed a grain of sand to my growth as an Engineer in the ICTs world.

INTRODUCTION

ADVANTAGES OF USING GLUSTERFS

USE CASES

VOLUMES - IMPLEMENTATION TOPOLOGIES

LICENCE

IMPLEMENTATION AND INSTALLATION SCENARIO

TRUSTED STORAGE POOL

CREATING A REPLICATED VOLUME

THE SPLIT BRAIN PROBLEM

CREATING AN ARBITRATED REPLICATED VOLUME

ADDING A PEER TO TRUSTED STORAGE POOL

REMOVING A POOL NODE AND A BRICK

BRICKS REPLACEMENT

STOPPING AND REMOVING VOLUMES

PUBLISHING GLUSTER VOLUMES

MOUNT BY NATIVE CLIENT (FUSE) – g1 Node

MOUNT BY SMB - SAMBA

MOUNT BY NFS

FEATURES IN VOLUMES

FEATURE – AUTO HEALING

FEATURE - BITROT - ERROR DETECTION

FEATURE - QUOTA MANAGEMENT

FEATURE - READ ONLY VOLUME

FEATURE - TRASHCAN

FEATURE - SNAPSHOT MANAGEMENT

SNAPSHOTS CLONING

FEATURE - GLUSTERFIND

WORKLOAD MONITORING

TUNING FOR PERFORMANCE

THE AUTOR

INTRODUCTION

The following practical guide is developed based on implementing a Software Defined Storage service using GlusterFS, is very important to you as a Technology Administrator have the context of what this software is, its capabilities and the different applications it has this tool.

GlusterFS is a scalable distributed file system, which aggregates disks from multiple servers in order to present Gluster volumes to its clients, in one way or another it conforms to the famous client-server model. You will have two more servers (this is known as a Trusted Pool of Servers) with disks, and from those disks you will generate Gluster volumes (grouping of two or more disks) which will be presented through protocols such as FUSE, NFS or SMB for the different use cases: file servers, storage for containers, Hyperconvergence, etc.

This document is not intended to be an official Gluster book, only a practical reference source on how to operate this platform from open source. You can acquire the commercial version of this platform with the sales executives of Red Hat Inc, however, if you believe that the open source version meets your requirement, this document will be very helpful.

The practices carried out and documented in this material have been done using the Linux CentOS 8.2.2004 operating system and the Gluster version has been 8.1. It is important to mention that documents generated by Red Hat such as the Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.x Administration Guide and the documentation from the gluster.org website have been used as support material.

ADVANTAGES OF USING GLUSTERFS

•  Can scale to Petabytes level

•  Can handle thousands of clients simultaneously

•  Compatible with POSIX standard

•  It can be implemented in servers of any commercial brand

•  Your volumes are published through protocols such as NFS or SMB

•  Provides functionalities such as volume replication, disk quotas, geo-replication, snapshots among others.

•  Allows monitoring and optimization of volumes

•  It is Open Source and has product and commercial support with companies such as Red Hat Inc.

USE CASES

There are multiple use cases that can occur with the implementation of Gluster, however this training guide is oriented to the