Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 11.10

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 03/29/2012

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Ubuntu 11.10. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use two systems, a server and a client:

• server1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.100 (server)
• client1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.101 (client)

Because we will run all the steps from this tutorial with root privileges, we can either prepend all commands in this tutorial with the string sudo, or we become root right now by typing

sudo su

Both systems should be able to resolve the other system's hostname. If this cannot be done through DNS, you should edit the /etc/hosts file so that it looks as follows on both systems:

vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost
192.168.0.100   server1.example.com     server1
192.168.0.101   client1.example.com     client1

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

(It is also possible to use IP addresses instead of hostnames in the following setup. If you prefer to use IP addresses, you don't have to care about whether the hostnames can be resolved or not.)

2 Setting Up The GlusterFS Server

server1.example.com:

GlusterFS is available as a package for Ubuntu 11.10, therefore we can install it as follows:

apt-get install glusterfs-server

The command

glusterfsd --version

should now show the GlusterFS version that you've just installed (3.2.1 in this case):

root@server1:~# glusterfsd --version
glusterfs 3.2.1 built on Jun 28 2011 07:43:56
Repository revision: v3.2.1
Copyright (c) 2006-2010 Gluster Inc. <http://www.gluster.com>
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of GlusterFS under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License.
root@server1:~#

If you use a firewall, ensure that TCP ports 111, 24007, 24008, 24009-(24009 + number of bricks across all volumes) are open on server1.example.com.

Next we create the share named testvol on localhost (= server1) in the /data directory (this will be created if it doesn't exist):

gluster volume create testvol server1.example.com:/data

root@server1:~# gluster volume create testvol server1.example.com:/data
Creation of volume testvol has been successful. Please start the volume to access data.
root@server1:~#

Start the volume:

gluster volume start testvol

It is possible that the above command tells you that the action was not successful:

root@server1:~# gluster volume start testvol
Starting volume testvol has been unsuccessful
root@server1:~#

You can check the status of the volume with the command

gluster volume info

root@server1:~# gluster volume info

Volume Name: testvol
Type: Distribute
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 1
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: server1.example.com:/data
root@server1:~#

If it tells you that the volume is started, everything is fine, otherwise just start it again.

By default, all clients can connect to the volume. If you want to grant access to client1.example.com (= 192.168.0.101) only, run:

gluster volume set testvol auth.allow 192.168.0.101

Please note that it is possible to use wildcards for the IP addresses (like 192.168.*) and that you can specify multiple IP addresses separated by comma (e.g. 192.168.0.101,192.168.0.102).

The volume info should now show the updated status:

gluster volume info

root@server1:~# gluster volume info

Volume Name: testvol
Type: Distribute
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 1
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: server1.example.com:/data
Options Reconfigured:
auth.allow: 192.168.0.101
root@server1:~#

3 Setting Up The GlusterFS Client

client1.example.com:

On the client, we can install the GlusterFS client as follows:

apt-get install glusterfs-client

Then we create the following directory:

mkdir /mnt/glusterfs

That's it! Now we can mount the GlusterFS filesystem to /mnt/glusterfs with the following command:

mount -t glusterfs server1.example.com:/testvol /mnt/glusterfs

You should now see the new share in the outputs of...

mount

root@client1:~# mount
/dev/mapper/server2-root on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
server1.example.com:/testvol on /mnt/glusterfs type fuse.glusterfs (rw,allow_other,default_permissions,max_read=131072)
root@client1:~#

... and...

df -h

root@client1:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/server2-root
                       29G  1.1G   27G   4% /
udev                  238M  4.0K  238M   1% /dev
tmpfs                  99M  212K   99M   1% /run
none                  5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                  247M     0  247M   0% /run/shm
/dev/sda1             228M   24M  193M  11% /boot
server1.example.com:/testvol
                       29G  1.1G   27G   4% /mnt/glusterfs
root@client1:~#

Instead of mounting the GlusterFS share manually on the client, you could modify /etc/fstab so that the share gets mounted automatically when the client boots.

Open /etc/fstab and append the following line:

vi /etc/fstab

[...]
server1.example.com:/testvol /mnt/glusterfs glusterfs defaults,_netdev 0 0

To test if your modified /etc/fstab is working, reboot the client:

reboot

After the reboot, you should find the share in the outputs of...

df -h

... and...

mount

4 Links

• GlusterFS: http://www.gluster.org/
• GlusterFS 3.2 Documentation: http://download.gluster.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/3.2/Documentation/AG/html/index.html
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/